Osaka Petrochemical Industries (OPC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsui Chemicals, has discovered a failure in the steam supply system of its ethylene plant while production was paused for scheduled maintenance. The restart of production operations will be delayed until the problem is resolved.

According to Mitsui Chemicals, while the company is working to fix the problem so that the plant may resume production at the earliest date possible, Mitsui currently expect that it will be approximately two or three months until this can occur. Once a more specific time frame is established, it will be disclosed in a separate release.

The company is diligently investigating the potential impacts and will inform individual customers as necessary. “We are currently investigating how the incident may affect our business results. In the event that this impact is predicted to be significant, it will be disclosed in a separate release,” the company stated.

The production capacity of OPC’s ethylene plant is 455,000 tons/year.