Minor explosion at China's Pucheng plant forced PP, PE units to run at reduced rate

According to market sources, Pucheng Clean Energy Chemical Co Ltd has experienced unexpected fire and explosion on its methanol pipeline yesterday (23 October 2016) causing emergency shutdown at its methanol units, fortunately, situation has been controlled and a source closed to the company informed that currently PP and PE units are running at a reduced rate at 60%, meanwhile its PP line is currently producing homo-PP injection (HP500N) grade, and this incident has affected about 50% of their supply, mainly on methanol.

Based in Shanxi, China, the company has a MTO-based PP and PE units with a production capacity of 400,000 ton/year and 300,000 ton/year respectively, and a 600,000 tons/year MTO unit. The methanol unit is expected to remain off-stream for 2 days.