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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Covestro is planning to
carry out maintenance work in May 2021 at its 270,000-metric-tons/year toluene
diisocyanate (TDI) plant in Dormagen, Germany, according to Chemweek with reference to market
sources.
“The TDI turnaround is expected in mid-May,” says a source. The
exact dates for the turnaround are not known, and Covestro declined to comment
when asked to specify them. “We don’t comment on turnarounds of our plants,”
says a company spokesperson. Another source suggested that the TDI unit
maintenance program could take two weeks. “Usually it takes two weeks if there
are no issues,” the source says.
BASF, meanwhile, is planning to carry
out maintenance from early March until the end of May this year at its
300,000-metric-tons/year TDI plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
“The month
that BASF Ludwigshafen comes back, Covestro will start its turnaround. It will
be interesting when they return, as we expect gasoline demand to improve in the
second quarter of this year. So, you may see TDI producers compete with gasoline
blenders for the toluene, which is a feedstock and a blend component at the same
time,” says Eleanor Dann, principal analyst/aromatics and fibers at IHS
Markit.
The TDI market in Europe was tight throughout the second half of
2020, but in December supply began to improve as all three European TDI makers
were operational, according to James Elliott, associate director/polyurethane
feedstocks at IHS Markit. “As we move into the second quarter of this year, two
major TDI suppliers will be on maintenance. Whilst stocks will have been built
up in advance of the downtimes, there is the potential for short-term tightness
to arise should the outages extend, like last year, beyond the initially planned
timeframe,” he says.
In October 2020 Covestro declared force
majeure on its TDI plant at Dormagen following the sudden failure of a central
pump at the facility. The force majeure affected all of Covestro’s TDI products
in the EAME region. The plant had been undergoing maintenance and was expected
to restart mid-October. Covestro lifted the force majeure on 1
November.
OPIS is an IHS Markit company.
As MRC reported earlier,
Covestro has closed the sale of its European polycarbonates (PC) sheets business
to the Munich-based Serafin Group effective January 2, 2020. This includes key
management and sales functions throughout Europe as well as production sites in
Belgium and Italy.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report,
Russia's estimated consumption of PC granules (excluding imports and
exports to\from Belarus) rose in January-November 2020 by 18% year on year to
83,600 tonnes (70,600 tonnes a year earlier).
Covestro (formerly Bayer
MaterialScience) is an independent subgroup within Bayer. It was created as part
of the restructuring of Bayer AG from the former business group Bayer Polymers,
with certain of its activities being spun off to Lanxess AG. Covestro
manufactures and develops materials such as coatings, adhesives and sealants,
polycarbonates (CDs, DVDs), polyurethanes (automotive seating, insulation for
refrigerating appliances) etc. With 2019 sales of EUR12.4 billion, Covestro has
30 production sites worldwide and employs approximately 17,200 people
(calculated as full-time equivalents) at the end of 2019. |
