US PS market quiet despite major plant outage

HOUSTON (ICIS)–The US polystyrene (PS) market was largely quiet this week despite the continued outage at Total Petrochemicals’ 658,000 tonne/year Carville plant in Louisiana, market sources said on Friday.

On 28 June the producer announced a force majeure on PS products due to the unplanned shutdown of its reactors. Total is making progress on the recovery of the PS lines at Carville, according to a 12 July customer letter obtained by ICIS.

In the letter, Total stated that piping inspections are nearly complete, and hydro-blasting procedures are continuing on all lines.

The producer anticipates PS availability as follows: Line 1 on 3 August; Line 3 on 28 July; Line 4 on 27 July; and Line 5 on 29 July. The schedule is subject to updates.

Total said that it was working on August allocations this week. It plans to start allocating the remaining inventory and to continue with the allocation of anticipated start-up production.

Each of the lines produces a variety of PS grades, so there may be differences in timing that could affect the availability of certain products. Total said it would provide a view of August orders on 15 July, and told customers that it would provide another update on the situation on 20 July.

In its 28 June force majeure letter, the producer said that its electricity provider’s transformer failure caused the shutdown of its reactors.

One distributor said it expected to see a lot more people in panic mode as a result of the outage, but that has not been the case. Rather, it is quiet. July is always a slow month; there are a lot of vacations, the distributor said. August is expected to be more active.

However, it was clear that some of Total’s customers were placing orders for July and August supplies from other producers, the producers said.

A market participant said that it did not see PS prices going up in July, and was not sure about prices in August. Two North American PS producers confirmed that they rolled July prices over.

A third producer announced late on 1 July that it was raising PS prices by 2 cents/lb ($44/tonne), effective on 1 July. It is still unclear how much, if any, of the announced price increase will be implemented.

North American PS producers include Americas Styrenics, Group Idesa, INEOS Styrolution, Resirene and Total Petrochemicals USA.