LyondellBasell closes French LDPE unit

LyondellBasell Industries (Rotterdam, Netherlands) will permanently shutter its smallest low-density polyethylene (LDPE) unit at Fos-sur-Mer, France. Idled since March, the plant's 80 permanent employees have begun a project to permanently shut down its nameplate capacity of 110,000 tonnes/yr. Going forward, LyondellBasell will focus its LDPE production activities in France at its world-scale plant located at Berre, which has more than 300,000 tonnes/yr of capacity.

In a statement, Richard Roudeix, LyondellBasell's VP for PE in Europe said, "Taking into account the current market environment and our future projections, our conclusion is that this plant is no longer economically viable," adding that the company can satisfy projected customer demand from its other LDPE facilities.

In March, LyondellBasell announced it would shutter its Chocolate Bayou (Alvin, TX) olefins complex by August 4. That plant has a nameplate capacity of 1.2 billion lb/yr of ethylene and 725 million lb/yr of propylene. As the company works its way through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, it will presumably undertake intensive reviews of all its production sites.

At the recent World Petrochemical Conference (March 25-26, Houston) organized by Chemical Marketing Associates Inc. (CMAI; Houston), a parade of speakers pointed to a massive buildup of over capacity in the chemicals and plastics industries, which will only heighten in coming years as new capacity is added, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. During CMAI, in addition to the announcement from LyondellBasell, global chemical/plastic giant BASF announced on March 25 that it would idle a steam naphtha cracker in Ludwigshafen, German, with an annual ethylene capacity of 220,000 tonnes. BASF, which already announced it would reduce production capacity globally by 25%, idled five lines in total at its Ludwigshafen Verbund site, with another 60 operating at what it calls "very low capacity utilization rates." -[email protected]