Huntsman Delays Restart of Gulf Coast Ethylene Unit

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Huntsman Corporation (Salt Lake City, Utah) is nearing completion of a project started earlier this year to retrofit and restart an idled ethylene unit at their Port Neches, Texas chemical plant. This unit, which is called the A3 unit and was built in the 1960's, operates with nine cracking furnaces (80 million btu each) and will be capable of producing 400 million pounds per year of ethylene when restarted.

Huntsman idled the facility in June of 2001 in response to sluggish market conditions. The company had originally planned to restart the unit in December of this year but after completing a market analysis determined that to restart it now would not be economically feasible.

Doug Culpon, Vice President of Petrochemicals, commented, "Recent increases in energy and raw material costs, declining petrochemical product demand and an uncertain outlook for the U.S. economy have led to our decision to delay the restart of the unit. We will, however, continue necessary maintenance and training to preserve the facility's viability, and plan to restart it as soon as economic conditions improve."

As part its North American Industrial Database, Industrialinfo.com reported in January that Huntsman was pursuing capital projects and planned to restart the unit within two years. The planned December restart is a dramatic change from the original schedule.

Ethylene producers enjoyed a much tighter market in the third quarter of this year than many expected they might and this supported price stability, although creating an oversupply of its by-product propylene. "As we end the year, ethylene producers are cautiously optimistic that the first quarter of 2003 will remain strong. Very few turnarounds are planned to begin until the second quarter of 2003," commented Trey Hamblet, Chemical Group Manager with Industrialinfo.com. "Currently we are tracking twenty planned maintenance turnarounds for 2003 representing a total of 591 days of downtime. The jury is still out on what to expect next year and the amount of downtime could be reduced if the few small capacity additions planned by Shell and others do not materialize on schedule," Mr. Hamblet added.