Just over a month after Haldia Petrochemical Limited (HPL) had announced the successful completion of its Rs 1,230-crore expansion project, sources said that the naphtha cracker facility has been shut down since late Wednesday.
“The plant has been shut down due to a hydro-carbon leakage. The company is currently evaluating the situation,” a source said. However, it remains unclear as to how long it will take before operations resume.
In February, HPL had opened its revamped plant, after a closure of almost three months, having raised the capacity of the facility from 5.2 lakh tonnes per annum (tpa) to about 6.7 tpa.
The expansion project, however, had been delayed by over two years resulting in an increase in the project cost from Rs 675 crore to Rs 1,230 crore.
“Haldia Petrochemicals has successfully completed the Supermax revamp project and pure product from Naphtha Cracker Unit (NCU) has been obtained on February 10. Pure butadiene and benzene are also being produced. Freshly produced polymer products are undergoing usual quality assurance procedures before dispatch to market,” the company had said in a statement.
The company had added that controlling the highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art new and modified systems has been successfully overcome, however, further stabilisation at higher throughputs will continue gradually.
But with the present shut-down, it is understood that the processes will be further scrutinised.
Moreover, this glitch comes as part of a string of incidents which have affected operations at the facility in recent months. In November last year, the expansion process had been hampered after a CITU-backed union called an indefinite strike over wage revisions of contractual workers.