US propylene maker PetroLogistics has restarted its 1.2 billion-pound propane dehydrogenation unit in Houston, Texas, after a brief shutdown, the company source said Thursday.
"We were down for about 24 hours or so," the source said.
Low air supply to the waste heat boiler caused the unit to shut down Tuesday evening, PetroLogistics said in a filing with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The waste heat boiler supplies steam to the reactor booster compressor.
"To minimize emissions, the process unit was shut down," the company said in the filing.
Petrologistics's PDH plant, billed as the largest in the world, has been beset with problems, mostly minor, since its delayed start-up in October, 2010. The glitches are to be expected of new plants, market sources have said in the past.
That being said, the same sources have argued that the interruptions have severely hampered Petrologistics' ability to impact the polymer-grade and chemical-grade propylene markets, which remain fundamentally tight and continue to see record-high prices as a result.
