Unplanned outage at Repsol’s Tarragona cracker in Spain

10 February 2011 14:07  [Source: ICIS news]

LONDON (ICIS)--Repsol’s cracker at Tarragona in Spain is offline and a restart is not anticipated until 14 February, a company spokesman said on Thursday.

“The cracker went down on Sunday [6 February],” the spokesman said, but he did not disclose the cause of the outage.

The cracker has the capacity to produce 660,000 tonnes/year of ethylene and 290,000 tonnes/year of propylene, according to ICIS data.

This unplanned shutdown was the third to last over a week since the beginning of the year. However, both SABIC’s Olefins 4 cracker in Geleen and Dow Chemical’s No 2 cracker in Terneuzen, both in the Netherlands, were back on stream.

Both the ethylene and propylene markets were regarded as balanced-to-tight in terms of supply and demand. Technical hitches on some derivative units had been able to offset the cracker production issues to some extent, but spot prices were at or above contract value.

The ethylene contract for February settled at €1,135/tonne  ($1,554/tonne) FD (free delivered) NWE (northwest Europe), while propylene was agreed at €1,105/tonne. 

($1 = €0.73)

For more on olefins visit ICIS chemical intelligence
For more on Repsol visit ICIS company intelligence
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By: Nel Weddle
+44 20 8652 3214

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