The European butadiene market is expected to tighten further going into March following the start of a cracker turnaround season, sources said last week.
European butadiene spot prices soared to a more than four-year high of $2,500/mt FOB Rotterdam, Friday.
Since the start of the year, European prices have surged tracking their Asian counterparts, but in the past week European tightness has lifted prices further.
This bullishness is expected to continue on impending production outages, with four major European cracker operators: Dow, ExxonMobil, Sabic Hydrocarbons and Total all scheduling maintenance of one-to-two months in coming weeks.
An estimated 11% of the region’s ethylene cracker capacity will come offline during the maintenance period, with a maximum of about 7% of capacity offline simultaneously between March and April.
This is expected to hamper butadiene supply, and cracker operators are already keen to maximize naphtha use to enhance their crude C4 yield due to the higher co-product value, sources have said.
