18 Jan - BASF shuts down unit at steam cracker site in Ludwigshafen, Germany
Source: MRCplast
BASF says it has shut down an unspecified unit at its 420,000-metric ton/year steam cracker site in Ludwigshafen, Germany, due to a technical defect, reporte Chemweek with reference to OPIS.
Unscheduled flaring started on 13 January at the northern part of the Ludwigshafen site and is expected to last until 17 January, it says. “At around 4pm [local time] there was an outage at a unit at the northern part due to a technical defect. The unit will be partially shut down to repair the defect,” it says.
BASF did not comment on the exact part of the site or what products might be affected, but confirmed the shutdown had no impact on production. The company operates the world’s largest integrated chemical complex at Ludwigshafen, which employs more than one-third of its global workforce, according to its website.
“Only a part of the plant is shut down, the production at the Ludwigshafen site is not affected,” a BASF spokesperson says. “We do not provide any information about the plant.”
BASF operates a second steam cracker at the northern part of Ludwigshafen, according to IHS Markit analysts and data, with a capacity of 240,000 metric tons/year. Crackers I and II mostly function independently of each other, “which means that when repair work is being carried out in one facility the other can continue operating as normal,” according to BASF on its website. The two crackers process around 2 million metric tons/year of feedstock naphtha.
