Chemical News
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Dow Declares Force Majeure for VAM at Texas City
https://www.chemnet.com Aug 22,2007 Chemical Week
Dow Chemical says it has declared force majeure for vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) at Texas City, TX due to “essential maintenance of critical plant equipment.” Customers will be placed on 50% allocation beginning September 3, and likely through the end of October, Dow says. The plant supplies North America, Latin America, and Europe. The plant maintenance comes at a time of low inventory and tight industry supply. Celanese declared force majeure on acetic acid, a raw material used to make VAM, in May due to an unplanned outage, and VAM and acetic acid prices increased as a result. Spot prices for VAM climbed as much as 50%, while contract VAM prices for June rose about 10%. BP declared force majeure on VAM at its 230,000 m.t./year Hull, U.K. for July due to continuing production problems. An outage at Ineos’ Grangemouth, U.K. cracker also curtailed recent VAM production, sources say. Meanwhile, global VAM demand is expected to grow at 3.3%-3.8%/year through 2011, SRI Consulting (SRIC; Menlo Park, CA) says. The global VAM market should start to loosen in 2009 with the startup of announced capacities, SRIC says. Celanese is building a 300,000-m.t./year VAM unit in Nanjing, China for startup in 2008, and plans to make incremental additions at several of its other units. Saudi International Petrochemical (Sipchem; Al Khobar) is planning to bring a 300,000-m.t./year VAM plant onstream at Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia at the end of 2008 as part of an acetyls complex.
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