MOSCOW (MRC) -- Sadara Chemical Company (Sadara) resumed operations at its naphtha cracker in Jubail, Saudi Arabia oin 11 April, 2021, after unscheduled repairs, according to CommoPlast.
The company announced an emergency shutdown of its cracker with a capacity of 1.5 million tons/year of ethylene and 400,000 tons/year of propylene im mid-March due to an issue at the compressor.
Besides, the company has also taken the downstream polyethylene (PE) plants offline until the cracker comes back online. The PE plant consists of a 340,000 tons/year of low density polyethylene (LDPE) line and a 600,000 tons/year high density polyethylene (HDPE)/linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) swing line.
Market sources added that the downstream PE units have also come back online at the time of this report.
As MRC informed before, in late March 2021, Saudi Aramco said it restructured its debt financing for Sadara Chemical Company, its joint venture (JV) with Dow Chemical, an American petrochemical major. The Saudi national oil company also said an agreement had been reached to allocate more natural gas feedstock to the joint venture, which has been building the world’s biggest chemical complex ever delivered in a single phase, in Jubail.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated polyethylene (PE) consumption totalled 356,370 tonnes in the first two month of 2021, down by 9% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market was 246,870 tonnes in January-February 2021, up by 30% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased.
MRC