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Dow restarting Texas City plant after power restored

https://www.chemnet.com   Apr 27,2011 ICIS
HOUSTON-Dow Chemical was restarting its Texas City operations after power was restored on Tuesday, the company said.

The Dow complex and three refineries were shut down after a power outage struck Texas City on Monday night.

A shelter-in-place order for Texas City was lifted by mid-day on Tuesday.

"Dow's Texas City operations facility is currently in the process of restarting the manufacturing units that were shut down during a power blip the site experienced last night, which resulted in an orderly shutdown of most of the site's units," said Dow spokesman Greg Baldwin.

"We are unaware of the cause of the widespread power outages in Texas City, but have no reason to believe they originated on our site," Baldwin added.

Dow's Texas City facilities can produce 365,000 tonnes/year of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), 255,000 tonnes/year of butanol, 430,000 tonnes/year of isopropanol, among other chemicals, according to ICIS plants and products.

Power to Valero's 214,000 bbl/day Texas City refinery was restored at 07:30 hours Houston time (12:30 hours GMT) and the facility was in the process of restarting, said company spokesman Bill Day.

Marathon was working to bring the impacted units back on line at its 76,000 bbl/day refinery, a company spokesman said.

BP gave no additional information regarding the status of its 475,000 bbl/day refinery and had no estimate on when the facility would restart.

The BP facility is the third-largest refinery in the US.

The outage originated when the plants' equipment started failing on Monday at 21:30 hours Texas City time (2:30 hours GMT), said Cathy Garber, spokeswoman for Texas New Mexico Power, the utility company that provides electricity to the plants and refineries in Texas City.

Altogether, the utility company noted four failures on the customer side, Garber said. Texas New Mexico Power did not identify the customers because regulations prohibit it from doing so.

When such failures occur, the utility company automatically cuts power to the customers, Garber said. This is intended to isolate any problems and to prevent them from spreading further, causing a larger outage.

Texas New Mexico Power does not know what caused the equipment failures at the plants, she said.

However, a possible cause of the failures is the drought that is affecting the region, Garber said.

Texas City is on the Gulf coast. As a result, water vapour from the Gulf of Mexico comes onshore.

As the vapour evaporates, it leaves salt on the surface of equipment, she said. Normally, rain would wash away the salt deposits.

Because of the drought, the salt may have remained on the equipment and that could have caused the equipment to fail, she said.

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