08 Mar - Dow Chemical restarts three crackers at Freeport, Texas
Source: MRCplast
Dow Chemical has been resuming operations at its three crackers at Freeport, Texas, according to S&P Global.
These crackers with a combined 3.2 million mt/year of ethylene capacity were shut in mid-February, 2021, because of very low temperatures in the region.
At present, it is unknown when Dow's crackers in Freeport will be fully restarted. As MRC informed earlier, Dow Chemical shut its ethylene cracker No. 3 at its Plaquemine, Louisiana site with the annual production of 758,000 mt for expansion from mid-September to end-November 2016. After the restart this cracker can produce by 250,000 mt of ethylene more than before.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
The Dow Chemical Company is an American multinational chemical corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. Dow is a large producer of plastics, including polystyrene (PS), polyurethane, polyethylene, polypropylene, and synthetic rubber.