Covestro (Leverkusen / Germany; www.covestro.com) has apparently restarted its domestic TDI line in Dormagen after resolving the technical issues that led to the outage there in mid-October (see Plasteurope.com of 15.10.2020). The company did not issue a statement, but a spokesperson said in response to a Plasteurope.com enquiry that the force majeure declared at the time of the outage was still in force; a timeframe was not provided.

The same is apparently true for Covestro’s US TDI facility in Baytown, Texas, though this line does not appear to have been restarted yet. The company declared force majeure at its Baytown site, following the recent hurricanes.

While the Dormagen line has started up again, it is unlikely that this will noticeably ease the supply situation in the short term. With many outages and maintenance turnarounds still ongoing in both Europe and the US, the bottlenecks will probably continue for several weeks (see Plasteurope.com of 20.10.2020). BASF, for example, isn’t expecting a test run of its TDI facility until the end of October.