SABIC shuts Netherlands Olefins 4 cracker on technical issues

LONDON (ICIS)–SABIC’s Olefins 4 cracker at Geleen in the Netherlands is off line because of unresolved technical problems, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

“We are experiencing some technical issues with Olefins 4 which started 25 January,” said the spokeswoman.

The cracker was shut down on Wednesday, 26 January.

The company was still investigating the cause of the problems, but was working hard to resolve them as soon as possible.

“We are looking at restart estimated at the end of next week [3-4 February],” the spokeswoman added.

Olefins 4, which has a nameplate capacity of 660,000 tonnes/year of ethylene according to ICIS data, is one of two crackers operated by SABIC at the site.

The news about Olefins 4 came after a source said Dow Chemical would take its No 2 cracker at Terneuzen, also in the Netherlands, off line by Friday [28 January] for two weeks.

These cracker outages as well as, potentially, some possible problems at a couple of other sites, notably in Germany, were expected to exacerbate an already tighter-than-expected olefins supply situation.

This tight supply-and-demand balance had led to increments being secured for February ethylene (C2) and propylene (C3) contract prices.

Ethylene settled at €1,135/tonne ($1,555/tonne), up €25/tonne from January.

Propylene settled at €1,105/tonne, up €35/tonne from January.

The contracts settled on a free delivered (FD) northwest Europe (NWE) basis and are fully confirmed.

($1 = €0.73)

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