Formosa's No 1 naphtha cracker in Mailiao down after explosion

07 July 2010 08:37  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Taiwan’s Formosa Petrochemical Corp (FPC) has shut the smallest of its three naphtha crackers in Mailiao due to an explosion at around noon on Wednesday, a company official said.

“We do not know what is the cause of the explosion yet,” the official said in Mandarin, adding that no one was injured at the 700,000 tonne/year cracker.

He added that the outage would affect ethylene supply to derivative plants but could not say if this would mean shutdowns at downstream units.

FPC's No 2 cracker at the same site can produce 1.03m tonnes/year of ethylene and the No 3 cracker has a nameplate ethylene capacity of 1.2m tonnes/year.

With additional reporting by Felicia Loo

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