When contacted by PIE, a company spokeswoman did not provide any details of the cause or potential duration of the outage. She did, however, confirm that the unit involved is the FCC splitter with an annual capacity of 240,000 t. Borealis operates a second unit with a similar capacity in Kallo, which is evidently continuing to run as normal.
This outage is further exacerbating the already tight situation for propylene in Europe. Even before this latest incident, a number of western European crackers had ceased or curtailed their production on account of malfunctions, and the situation in central and eastern Europe is no different. Maintenance work is scheduled for a further four crackers from February to May – according to PIE's Polyglobe capacity database (www.polyglobe.net) availability is approaching 85% at present. This has pushed spot prices up to some EUR 815/t (previous month: EUR 750/t) and a clear upward trend is expected for the March contract too.