Dow’s Union Carbide plant in Texas in restart after outage

26 August 2011 17:40  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS)--Dow Chemical’s Union Carbide complex at Texas City was in restart mode on Friday following a power outage on Thursday, a company spokesperson said.

The Union Carbide operations, a wholly owned subsidiary of US-based Dow, experienced an unexpected shutdown on Thursday as a result of an “electrical event”, said Dow spokesperson Amy Ahlich. She said the incident was caused by a thunderstorm.

“Due to the same event, the site’s third party steam supplier was unable to provide steam, which is necessary for Texas City Operations to run its units, until this morning,” Ahlich continued. “Texas City Operations is now beginning a safe, orderly restart of its units.”

The Texas City operation has eight plants manufacturing more than 2.2bn lb/year (998,000 tonnes/year), according to Dow’s website.

The Texas City operation manufactures more than 30 chemical products, including isopropanol, and aldehydes, organic acids and vinyl acetate.

Annual production at the site includes 365,000 tonnes of vinyl acetate (VAM), 255,000 tonnes of butanol, 430,000 tonnes of isopropanol (IPA), and other materials, according to ICIS plants and projects

Additional reporting by Ruth Liao

For more on Dow visit ICIS company intelligence

By: Brian Ford
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