UpdateLyondellBasell confirms Texas cracker shutdown in Q2

31 January 2011 23:37  [Source: ICIS news]

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HOUSTON (ICIS)--LyondellBasell confirmed on Monday that it plans to shut down one of its Channelview crackers in Texas for planned maintenance in the second quarter of 2011.

The company did not provide details, but market sources said the unit scheduled for the shutdown was the OP-2 cracker, which has 873,000 tonnes/year of ethylene capacity.

LyondellBasell has another cracker in Channelview, OP-1, with the same capacity.

Earlier in the day, market sources said that Chevron Phillips Chemical planned to take its Sweeny 24 cracker in Texas down for maintenance in late March.

The 676,000 tonne/year unit will be off line for about a month, the sources said.

Chevron Phillips did not respond to a request for confirmation.

The company has two other crackers in Sweeny with combined ethylene capacity of 1.2m tonnes/year.

Market sources also said that Formosa Plastics had planned maintenance in the coming months.

Formosa was expected to shut down its Point Comfort olefins II unit, also in Texas, for 35 days in September.

Formosa’s olefins II cracker has 816,000 tonnes/year of ethylene capacity.

Formosa Plastics declined to comment.

For more on LyondellBasell and Chevron Phillips Chemical visit ICIS company intelligence
For more on ethylene visit ICIS chemical intelligence
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By: William Lemos
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