Planned Ethylene Turnarounds for 2010 Squeeze into the First Half of the Year

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Generally, each year brings 10 or more planned ethylene unit maintenance turnarounds in the United States and Canada. This year, ethylene maintenance activity looks to be well short of this number, with only six planned ethylene unit turnarounds currently identified in the two countries. In an incredibly depressed year for ethylene demand in 2009, ethylene producers also enjoyed a quiet hurricane season. The downtime allowed many to focus on keeping inventories under control and implementing scheduled maintenance activities. Despite a slow uptick in the operating rates of downstream chemicals in the olefins and polyolefins sectors, recovery for ethylene producers will be quite slow.

All six identified ethylene unit turnarounds will take place in the first half of this year. This much turnaround activity early in the year reinforces expectations that demand will increase later in the year, and that now is the time to have capacity offline. Shell Chemical Company (Houston, Texas) is in the midst of completing a planned turnaround of the OP-1 ethylene unit in the company's Norco, Louisiana, plant. Portions of this turnaround were completed in February 2009, when the unit was taken offline for market reasons.

There are two ethylene units planned to begin maintenance turnaround work in early March, one by Imperial Oil Limited (Sarnia, Ontario) at the company's site in Sarnia, and the other by Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC (CPChem) in Baytown, Texas. Each of these turnarounds is considered a major event, lasting 40 days or more.

Short of unplanned downtime caused by weather or major mechanical failures, these turnarounds are it for the year and build up to a much larger amount of turnaround activity in 2011 and 2012. Already, Industrial Info is tracking an above-average amount of planned ethylene turnarounds for the coming two years as part of its Ethylene Tracking Database. So far, these turnarounds are fairly evenly spread through different times of the year. Considering these plant owners will begin to procure services and schedule deliveries a year or more in advance for these turnarounds, attention is already being focused on next year.

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