BP’s petrochemicals production in Europe fell 8.4% year on year to 3.5 million mt in 2015, the company said Tuesday.
Global petrochemicals production rose 5.3% to 14.8 million mt in 2015, pulled up by the 19.7% growth in production outside of the US and Europe to 7.6 million mt, BP said in a statement. In the US, production slid 4.6% to 3.7 million mt.
In Europe, steam cracker outages contributed to the drop in production last year.
At the end of March, BP Refining and Petrochemicals declared force majeure on a cracker at Gelsenkirchen, Germany, due to a power outage. BPRP has two crackers at the site with a combined capacity of 1.05 million mt/year.
At the beginning of July, BPRP declared force majeure on propylene deliveries from the Mineraloelraffinerie Oberrhein refinery at Karlsruhe, Germany, of which it owns a stake.
2015 was marked by an “unusually” high number of cracker outages in Europe — touching a high of 25% in March of total production in NWE. The asset reliability of European crackers and downstream units is expected to remain a concern in 2016, following a year of unprecedented production issues throughout the chain.
Polymer production units and crackers have suffered from technical issues stemming from high utilization rates, combined with older technology, leading to a string of production problems.
Industry analysts believe that this will continue: “[Declarations of] force majeure are a regular occurrence in the European polymer business because of the age of most petrochemical production sites. There is no doubt that force majeures will occur in 2016,” Joe Pilaro, head of US consultancy Brae Partners, said to Platts in December.
