MOSCOW (MRC) -- Nghi Son Refinery and Petrochemical (NSRP) is conducting maintenance works at its new polypropylene (PP) plant in Vietnam, reported CommoPlast with reference to a source close to the producer.
Thus, the 400,000 mtyear of PP plant was shut on 24 August 2021, instead of the initially scheduled date of 17 August, for approximately three weeks. The company decided to postpone the maintenance shutdown at this plant by one week from the previous schedule due to the COVID-19 related lockdown.
Demand in the local Vietnam market has been sluggish due to the COVID-19 outbreak that forced many manufacturing plants to shut down. The condition is not expected to improve in the next couple of weeks, leaving suppliers here under tremendous pressure.
“Due to the delay in the maintenance schedule, we are having extra allocations. The export market is better than the local ground, but shipping is the main issue,” the source added.
As MRC reported earlier, in the third week of September 2020, NSRP restarted its PP unit in Vietnam following a 10 days unscheduled shutdown starting 7 September 2020 due to a persistent technical issue. And this year, NSRP also shut its PP plant in central Vietnam from 30 March to 13 April 2021 for a two-week turnaround due to a technical issue.
We also remind that Vietnam’s Nghi Son oil refinery officially began commercial production from 14 November 2018, following months of tests. The USD9 billion refinery is 35.1% owned by Japan’s Idemitsu Kosan Co, 35.1% - by Kuwait Petroleum, 25.1% - by PetroVietnam and 4.7% - by Mitsui Chemicals Inc.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC