Dow Chemical Shuts Down Petrochemical Site in Chile

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources Latin America (Cordoba, Argentina)--Petroquimica Dow S.A. (Santiago, Chile), the Chilean subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company (NYSE:DOW) (Midland, Michigan), decided to shut down its polyethylene plant in Chile due to a lack of ethylene feedstock supply.

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Dow plans to close the 46,000-metric-tonne-per-year low-density polyethylene (LDPE) unit at its plant in Talcahuano city, in Concepcion province, Biobio region. The main reason is the final closure of Enap Refinerias' (Santiago, Chile) 132 million-pound-per-year ethylene unit at its Bio Bio Refinery, which provided Dow with the ethylene necessary to maintain LDPE generation. Enap is owned by Chile's national petroleum refining company.

Enap halted its ethylene production in May this year. Although Enap's unit will not be dismantled, it will not resume operations nor undergo any upgrades, mainly due to the high costs and low profitability for the company.

Before the definitive closure of the ethylene unit, Dow's LDPE plant, which had been operational for the last three decades, had been experiencing a shortage of feed. Dow had been studying different alternatives in order to avoid a shutdown, but the situation forced the company to cancel the plant's scheduled maintenance investments, shut down the site, and dismantle it.

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