MOSCOW (MRC) -- Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore (PCS) has restarted its aromatics plant No. 2 following an unplanned outage, according to Apic-online.
A Polymerupdate source in the Singapore informed that, the company has resumed operations at the plant on January 18, 2020. The plant was shut in end-December, 2019 owing to technical issues.
Located in Ayer Merbau, Jurong Island, Singapore, the plant has a production capacity 168,000 mt/year of benzene, 91,000 mt/year of toluene and 64,000 mt/year of mixed xylene.
As MRC wrote before, in mid-April 2017, PCS shut the smaller of two naphtha crackers following an outage, and the unit was expected to stay offline for about 14 days. The smaller unit produces 465,000 tonnes of ethylene a year. The larger unit, which has a capacity of 635,000 tonnes per year (tpy) of ethylene and 350,000 mt/year of propylene, was operating at maximum capacity at that time.
Benzene is a feedstock for the production of styrene monomer (SM), which, in its turn, is the main feedstock for manufacturing polystyrene (PS).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated consumption of PS and styrene plastics totalled 458,770 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2019, which corresponds to the previous year's level. November estimated consumption of PS and styrene plastics in the Russian Federation rose by 2% year on year, totalling 49,210 tonnes.
PS production remained in January-November 2019 the same as a year earlier. Russian producers manufactured 471,390 tonnes of material in the first eleven months of 2019.
PCS is jointly owned by Japan-Singapore Petrochemicals Company (led by Sumitomo Chemical), Qatar Petroleum International and Shell Petrochemicals (Singapore).
MRC