Westlake to restart Petro-1 steam cracker in Lake Charles, Louisiana this week

12-Jul-16

US petrochemical producer Westlake Chemical is expecting to restart its Petro-1 steam cracker in Lake Charles, Louisiana, by mid-July, as per market sources with knowledge of operations in Platts. The startup talk is on the tail end of an 80-day planned outage that started on April 19. The turnaround will also include a capacity expansion of 113,000 mtpa
The company operates two steam crackers at the site -- Petro-1, with current ethylene capacity of 567,000 m tpa, and Petro-2, with 886,000 m tpa. The company is currently under a force majeure declaration at its Calvert City, Kentucky, vinyls complex, stemming from an unplanned outage on June 1 at the 299,000 m tpa steam cracker at the site. The restart of the Kentucky plant was expected in late July, sources added. Westlake will become the fifth US Gulf Coast producer to complete a planned maintenance in the past two months, after four planned turnarounds were completed in Texas. The sole remaining planned and ongoing outage is LyondellBasell's Corpus Christi, Texas, expansion, which is bringing a 363,000 m tpa addition to its 771,000 m tpa ethylene plant.