Chandra Asri to shut plant

Chandra Asri to shut plant

SINGAPORE (Reuters): Indonesia's PT Chandra Asri, the country's only olefin producer, is planning to shut its 520,000 ton per year ethylene cracking complex located in Cilegon, West Java for 10 days in July for maintenance, a company source said yesterday.

But the source declined to give further details.

Traders said that the plant had an unscheduled shutdown recently.

They said the unscheduled shutdown, combined with other outages in China fueled a rise in spot ethylene prices.

Ethylene spot prices went up to US$540 per ton cost-and- freight Southeast Asia from $340 in September as a result of the outages.

But the source said the cracker is now running at full capacity.

The company is planning to expand the cracker's ethylene capacity by 150,000 tons per year sometime after 1999.