Power outages remain high, delay chem plant restarts

Author: Al Greenwood

2020/09/02

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Power outages have persisted on Wednesday in Louisiana and Texas, making it harder for petrochemical plants to resume operations.

Many plants remain shut down in part because of power outages, even though they escaped major damage from Hurricane Laura. The storm made landfall early on 27 August in Louisiana, close to the border with Texas.

The number of power outages reported by utilities remains high, as shown in the following table.

Source: PowerOutage.US

Entergy is the main power distributor in the regions hit hardest by the storm. The company is focusing on restoring power to critical community infrastructure such as fire and police departments, hospitals, water utilities and communications services, it said, adding, “As we restore service to residential, commercial and industrial customers, we must do it in a way that balances the needs of our customers with the ability to support additional load as the system permits.”

Entergy gave no timeline as to when it could restore power to industrial plants.

A synthetic rubber producer said one plant may not get power until mid-September.

PLANT UPDATES

Covestro declared force majeure on toluene diisocyanate (TDI) supplies in North America as of 1 September, according to a company spokesperson.

The company said that the force majeure declaration was necessitated by the recent shutdown of the company’s facility in Baytown, Texas, ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Laura, along with an unforeseen shortage of a key raw material used in production.

Baytown is near Houston, which saw few effects from the storm. Nevertheless, many companies in the region shut down operations as a precaution.

Plants farther away from the landfall site suffered little damage and are resuming operations.

Capacity for some products was clustered around the area hit by Hurricane Laura, which caused a large portion of US production for those products to be shut down.

https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2020/09/02/10548266/power-outages-remain-high-delay-chem-plant-restarts