(ICIS) -- Shell will restrict US ethylene deliveries to 90% in December following the shutdown of one of its Norco crackers in Louisiana, market sources said on Wednesday. The company said the cracker was taken off line on 27 November because of a ruptured steam line. The duration of the outage was not yet known, a Shell spokesperson said.
Shell has two crackers at the site with a combined ethylene capacity of 1.4m tonnes/year. Market participants said the unit affected was the smaller cracker, GO-1, which has 558,000 tonnes/year of capacity. One market source estimated the unit could be down for 4-6 weeks, depending on the extent of the damage. Shell did not provide details except to say that more information would be available after an inspection of the unit is completed.