Formosa Petrochem idles No. 2 naphtha cracker for planned maintenance

09-Oct-10

Formosa Petrochemical Corp has idled No. 2 naphtha cracker for planned maintenance. One of the Taiwanese majors’ other three crude distillation units, shut in late July following an outage, will restart around mid-October. The No. 2 cracker will shut today for a 40-day maintenance, while the CDU will restart around mid-October. Formosa was impacted by two separate fires in July- one at its 700,000 tpa No. 1 cracker in early July, and another at its 540,000 bpd refinery late that month. Due to the outage at its No. 1 unit, Formosa had delayed the maintenance at its No. 2 cracker to early October from Aug. 20. Two CDUs were brought back online on July 29 and Aug. 3, and are running at around 90% capacity.