MOSCOW (MRC) -- Covestro is planning to carry out maintenance work in May 2021 at its 270,000-metric-tons/year toluene diisocyanate (TDI) plant in Dormagen, Germany, according to Chemweek with reference to market sources.
“The TDI turnaround is expected in mid-May,” says a source. The exact dates for the turnaround are not known, and Covestro declined to comment when asked to specify them. “We don’t comment on turnarounds of our plants,” says a company spokesperson. Another source suggested that the TDI unit maintenance program could take two weeks. “Usually it takes two weeks if there are no issues,” the source says.
BASF, meanwhile, is planning to carry out maintenance from early March until the end of May this year at its 300,000-metric-tons/year TDI plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
“The month that BASF Ludwigshafen comes back, Covestro will start its turnaround. It will be interesting when they return, as we expect gasoline demand to improve in the second quarter of this year. So, you may see TDI producers compete with gasoline blenders for the toluene, which is a feedstock and a blend component at the same time,” says Eleanor Dann, principal analyst/aromatics and fibers at IHS Markit.
The TDI market in Europe was tight throughout the second half of 2020, but in December supply began to improve as all three European TDI makers were operational, according to James Elliott, associate director/polyurethane feedstocks at IHS Markit. “As we move into the second quarter of this year, two major TDI suppliers will be on maintenance. Whilst stocks will have been built up in advance of the downtimes, there is the potential for short-term tightness to arise should the outages extend, like last year, beyond the initially planned timeframe,” he says.
In October 2020 Covestro declared force majeure on its TDI plant at Dormagen following the sudden failure of a central pump at the facility. The force majeure affected all of Covestro’s TDI products in the EAME region. The plant had been undergoing maintenance and was expected to restart mid-October. Covestro lifted the force majeure on 1 November.
OPIS is an IHS Markit company.
As MRC reported earlier, Covestro has closed the sale of its European polycarbonates (PC) sheets business to the Munich-based Serafin Group effective January 2, 2020. This includes key management and sales functions throughout Europe as well as production sites in Belgium and Italy.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated consumption of PC granules (excluding imports and exports to\from Belarus) rose in January-November 2020 by 18% year on year to 83,600 tonnes (70,600 tonnes a year earlier).
Covestro (formerly Bayer MaterialScience) is an independent subgroup within Bayer. It was created as part of the restructuring of Bayer AG from the former business group Bayer Polymers, with certain of its activities being spun off to Lanxess AG. Covestro manufactures and develops materials such as coatings, adhesives and sealants, polycarbonates (CDs, DVDs), polyurethanes (automotive seating, insulation for refrigerating appliances) etc. With 2019 sales of EUR12.4 billion, Covestro has 30 production sites worldwide and employs approximately 17,200 people (calculated as full-time equivalents) at the end of 2019.
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