Dow restarts Louisiana cracker but one unit still down

25 February 2011 18:28  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS)--Dow Chemical has restarted its St Charles cracker in Louisiana, which went down in the first week of January following a power outage, the company said on Friday.

The 610,000 tonne/year cracker was expected to resume production three weeks ago, but sources said Dow experienced problems when it tried to bring the unit on stream.

St Charles was one of two Dow crackers in Louisiana that were off line in the past weeks. The company’s unit in Plaquemine, which Dow shut down for repairs on 16 February, remains off line, a spokesperson said.

Dow has two crackers in Plaquemine with combined ethylene capacity of 1.26m tonnes/year.

The unit affected was Plaquemine 2, which has around 500,000 tonnes/year of capacity, a company spokesperson said.

The restart date was not yet known, market sources said.

Plaquemine is the only US cracker down at the moment, according to sources.

Another recent outage included LyondellBasell’s La Porte cracker in Texas, but the unit was restarted early this week, the company said in a public filing.

The 789,000 tonne/year cracker went down on 14 February following a loss of steam.

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By: William Lemos
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