UPDATE: Malaysia’s PrefChem to extend shutdown to late 2020

According to sources close to the company, Pengerang Refining and Petrochemical (PrefChem) might need to keep its entire petrochemical complex in the Southern state of Johor offline until late 2020 following the explosion at the 300,000 barrel/day refinery unit in March.

There have been speculations that the explosion might have caused more serious damages than initially expected, causing a longer time to perform necessary repair works.

It is still unclear if the company would source any spot naphtha, ethylene, or propylene cargoes to operate the downstream units at the time of this report.

PrefChem owns two PP lines at the Johor complex with a combined capacity of 900,000 tons/year, a 400,000 tons/year HDPE line, and a 350,000 tons/year LLDPE line. The naphtha cracker has an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons/year of ethylene and 600,000 tons/year of propylene.