Ethylene Europe

摘要

Tightness in supply was maintained this week, with ethylene closing Friday at Eur1,130/mt FD NWE, unchanged week on week. A number of sources said there were bearish price expectations on impending production restarts, and the return of Middle Eastern volumes, although demand remained unchanged. Nevertheless, molecules were extremely tight on the prompt, one trader said. In production news, Total’s naphtha-based cracker number 2 in Antwerp, Belgium, resumed normal operations Wednesday following an outage that began at the end of April, the company said in a letter seen by Platts Friday. The outage at the NC2 cracker, which has an ethylene production capacity of about 610,000 mt/year, has affected downstream polyethylene and polypropylene production.