Petronas operating rates at its 1.7 million mt/year methanol plant at Labuan were at least 80% as of early Friday, a source close to the company said.
The company had shut the plant on October 3 due to a natural gas supply disruption, and was only able to restart the plant on October 18, another source close to the company noted earlier this week.
The company was targeting to reach gradually stable operations of around 90%, the source noted then.
A source close to the company had estimated on October 13 that the shutdown could stretch out until the latter part of October.
Despite the outage, the company did not need to issue a force majeure as it had sufficient inventory.
A disruption of natural gas supplies shut the plant between July 19 and August 10 this year as well, and the company had to issue a force majeure during that time due to the production cut.
Petronas also has an older 660,000 mt/year methanol plant at Labuan, which has been idled since July 2009 due to water shortage, and the company does not plan to restart this plant in the near future, a source close to the company had confirmed earlier this week
