Formosa Plastics plans to restart multiple units at Texas over long holiday weekend

28-Jun-17

Formosa Plastics 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 sources in Platts. 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 and 736,000 m tpa of chlor-alkali