LSB Industries Inc. said Oct. 19 that its Pryor, Okla., ammonia plant resumed production Oct. 8. The company had announced Oct. 5 (GM Oct. 7, p. 15) that the plant was down as a scheduled turnaround had been extended to perform additional work on both the ammonia and urea plants in order to increase their reliability going forward. It earlier said the plant was expected back up by Oct. 10.
LSB expects Pryor’s urea plant to return to service by Nov. 1, which will enable the facility to resume production of UAN. On Oct. 5, LSB had expected the urea plant to be back up by Oct. 15, however, it said the delay was a result of the inspection process by the welding contractor’s Authorized Inspector (AI), which is responsible for ensuring that work on pressure vessels meets federal and state codes. In addition to addressing the increased scope of work dictated by the AI related to corrosion in the urea plant’s pressure vessel and liner, LSB has elected to implement design changes to the vessel’s liner in order to minimize future corrosion and related downtime.
LSB expects the additional downtime related to this work on Pryor’s urea plant to have little to no impact on LSB’s fourth quarter 2016 EBITDA above what was disclosed Oct. 5.