Chevron Phillips puts US olefins on force majeure - sources

04 March 2010 18:25  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS news)--Chevron Phillips Chemicals has declared force majeure (FM) on US olefins deliveries following an outage at one of its Sweeny crackers in Texas, market sources said on Thursday.

No details were available on allocation levels or the length of the restriction.

A Chevron Phillips spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Chevron Phillips has three crackers in Sweeny with combined ethylene capacity of around 1.86m tonnes/year, according to the company's most recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Chevron Phillips idled one of the three crackers in late 2008, citing weak market conditions.

The outage this week was said to have affected a 930,000 tonne/year unit, which leaves a single cracker with around 670,000 tonnes/year of capacity in operation at the site.

Chevron Phillips has two other crackers in Texas, in Port Arthur and Cedar Bayou, but the Cedar Bayou unit was taken off line this week for a turnaround of nearly two months.

The Port Arthur cracker has 794,000 tonnes/year of capacity, according to the company’s SEC filing.

For more on ethylene, visit ICIS chemical intelligence
For more on ChevronPhillips’ plants, visit ICIS plants and projects
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By: William Lemos
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