At the height of tough price discussions for polypropylene in Europe, the PP plant operated by LyondellBasell (Rotterdam / The Netherlands; www.lyondellbasell.com) at Carrington / UK is reported to have gone down at the beginning of this week. An attempt to restart the facility is said to be scheduled for Friday, 1 October.

Although the situation apparently is not dire enough for the company to declare force majeure, customers for eight grades of PP are believed to have already been put on allocation. If the restart is unsuccessful, an FM declaration could follow, Plasteurope.com’s sources say. At Carrington, LyondellBasell produces a wide range of speciality PP products such as random copolymer. PIE’s Polyglobe capacity database (www.polyglobe.net) shows the plant with a nameplate capacity of 230,000 t/y.

European PP producers are currently facing steep price declines for their products. In September, they had to make concessions that in some cases exceeded the fall in C3 notations. In October, they will surely want to cap rebates at the monomer’s decline.