MOSCOW (MRC) -- A fire broke out at one of the naphtha pipelines belong to Haldia Petrochemical in West Bengal, India on Tuesday, 3 August 2021, which took several hours to bring under control, according to CommoPlast.
The petrochemical complex was carrying out maintenance works when the incident took place. A senior official from Haldia was quoted as “Naphtha is highly combustible and a little spark might cause a fire. Generally, we clear the entire tank before any kind of repair work, but there is a possibility that some residual chemical was lying in the pipeline which caused the fire."
In September 2019, as MRC reported earlier, a similar incident occurred at the naphtha cracker that injured 15 people at the site.
The 700,000 tons/year naphtha cracker was shut on 1 August for routine maintenance. The unit was initially scheduled to restart in the first week of September 2021. However, the fire might force the company to take longer to come back, though confirmation from Haldia at the time of this report.
The company also shut downstream units including 340,000 tons/year polypropylene (PP) line, 250,000 tons/year standalone high density polyethylene (HDPE) line, and a 240,000 tons/year HDPE/linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) swing line.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd is a modern naphtha based petrochemical complex at Haldia, West Bengal, India. Haldia has played the role of a catalyst in emergence of more than 500 downstream processing industries in West Bengal with a capacity to process more than 3,50,000 TPA of polymers, among which are polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP)