Mexico’s PE shortages worsen on cracker outage

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Mexico’s chronic polyethylene (PE) shortages for lack of ethane are now aggravated by a cracker outage at the Cangrejera facility, a company source said on Monday.

The outage started because of problems with the energy supply to the plant.

The Cangrejera cracker has a nominal capacity of 600,000 tonnes/year and supports PE production for Pemex plants, among others.

As a result, the three low density polyethylene (LDPE) trains at the complex are down for lack of ethylene.

Two other plants producing high density polyethylene (HDPE) are also down for the same reason. The 100,000 tonne/year Asahi plant and the 80,000 tonne/year Mitsui plant producing injection and blow moulding material, respectively, are also idled.

The only plant currently working normally is the 300,000 tonnes/year Morelos swing plant, used exclusively for the production of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE).

The cracker has been down for a few days and it is scheduled to restart this week, but has no firm start-up date.

Other ethylene derivatives such as ethylene oxide, ethylene di-chloride (EDC) and styrene are affected by the outage as well.

Pemex has stopped deliveries of ethylene to those plants. The outages play into the hands of Braskem-Idesa, which is quietly building up market share in Mexico. US producers and importers of US products are also benefitting from the Pemex outages.

Pemex officials are just returning from the holidays and expect to have a better grip on production status by the end of this week, the source said.