Some of Mexico’s PE production plants still down

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Mexico’s polyethylene (PE) shortages for lack of ethane continue to affect production, a company source said on Friday.

The Cangrejera cracker has restarted after a 10-day outage, but production of ethylene is still too short to feed all PE plants.

Only one of three low density polyethylene (LDPE) trains at the Cangrejera complex is actually in operation.

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

Two other plants producing high density polyethylene (HDPE) are down because of the ethylene shortages.

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

Pemex is selling its LDPE and LLDPE production, and also HDPE from stocks, while they last.

The only domestic PE producers in Mexico are Pemex and Braskem Idesa.