MOSCOW (MRC) -- Formosa Plastics, part of Formosa Petrochemical, expects to restart multiple units at its Point Comfort, Texas, complex over the long Fourth of July holiday weekend following an unplanned outage, as per Plastemart.
The outage began Saturday after lightning struck a transformer, causing a power outage at a pair of olefins units, as well as the polyethylene, polypropylene, ethylene glycol and chlor-alkali plants, sources said.
Formosa could not immediately provide comments. A source with knowledge of company operations said the shutdown was having an impact on production at the site, with the outage expected to last 7 to 10 days.
The Point Comfort complex, Formosa's largest in the US, is located about 90 miles from Corpus Christi on the Texas Gulf Coast. Formosa's steam crackers produce about 3.3 mln mtpa of olefins at Point Comfort. The complex can produce almost 1.5 mln mtpa of high density polyethylene, 582,000 m tpa of linear low-density polyethylene, 1.9 mln mtpa of polypropylene (PP) and 736,000 m tpa of chlor-alkali.
As MRC reported earlier, in 2015, Formosa Plastics Corporation, U.S.A. announced that it would build a new, state-of- the-art PP production line at its Point Comfort, Texas site. This will be the first new PP production to be built in the US in many years.
Formosa Petrochemical is involved primarily in the business of refining crude oil, selling refined petroleum products and producing and selling olefins (including ethylene, propylene, butadiene and BTX) from its naphtha cracking operations. Formosa Petrochemical is also the largest olefins producer in Taiwan and its olefins products are mostly sold to companies within the Formosa Group. Among the company's chemical products are paraxylene (PX), phenyl ethylene, acetone and pure terephthalic acid (PTA). The company's plastic products include acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) resins, polystyrene (PS), polypropylene (PP) and panlite (PC).
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