Dow Confirms Spanish Cracker Outage

The Spanish subsidiary of Dow Chemical has confirmed that its light hydrocarbon cracker at Tarragona was taken off stream for repairs and maintenance following an incident on Oct. 8.

Identifying the cause of the shutdown as mechanical failure of a valve in the ethylene cracker process area, the company said on Friday that it was preparing to restart the facility, without naming a date. It did not provide any information about possible downstream outages.

Output of the Tarragona cracker at just over 1 million t/y is split to about two-thirds between ethylene and propylene. The site also houses production units for LDPE and LLDPE.