Market and product

Shell might have to declare force majeure (FM) on the ethylene output at the company’s 960,000 tonne/year cracker at Bukom Island in Singapore after the unit was shut late on Wednesday following a technical issue, market sources said.

Shell did not respond immediately to queries regarding the shutdown.

The company’s styrene monomer (SM) operations have also been affected by the shutdown, but there were no further details on how other downstream operations were impacted, sources said.

The company has two SM plants on nearby Jurong Island consisting of a 550,000 tonne/year unit and a 390,000 tonne/year unit.

Market sources said that the downstream SM plants could have been disrupted because of the outage but this was not confirmed by company sources.

The 500,000 bbl/day refinery at Bukom is the largest wholly-owned Shell refinery globally in terms of crude distillation capacity.

Bukom also houses an ethylene cracker complex and a butadiene extraction unit.

The facilities on Bukom are integrated with the company’s manufacturing site on Jurong Island which manufactures ethylene oxide, ethoxylates, styrene monomer (SM), propylene oxide (PO) and polyols.