An unplanned cracker outage in the US Gulf Coast was sending US spot ethylene prices up Tuesday morning.
Multiple market sources said Williams' 1.2-billion lb/year ethylene unit in Geismar, Louisiana was down, prompting June ethylene to surge 3 cents in morning trading from Monday's Platts assessment.
Ethylene was heard traded at 67 cents/lb for June Tuesday morning, a day after product was heard bid around 63.50 cents/lb and a July deal was heard done at 64 cents/lb MtB Wms.
Neither the cause of the outage nor the cracker's expected downtime were immediately known, although market sources reported hearing operations could be down a week or longer.
Williams could not immediately be reached for comment.
Williams' olefins operations at Geismar also include production of about 90 million lb/year of polymer-grade propylene.
