Roughly 20 months since an explosion at the plant killed two workers and injured scores of others, Williams Partners’ Geismar facility is once again making and selling ethylene, a key ingredient in chemical manufacturing.
“This is a significant milestone achievement in our effort to restore reliable operations at our plant for the benefit of our customers, employees, contractors and the community,” Senior Vice President of NGL & Petchem Services John Dearborn says in a prepared statement issued today.
Along with resuming ethylene production, Williams says it has also completed a roughly $400 million expansion project announced in 2011 that has increased production capacity by 44% to 1.95 billion pounds per year.
The Geismar plant shut down after the June 13, 2013 accident, which destroyed much of the facility. The explosion reportedly was ignited by a rupture in a reboiler.
The closure and interruption in business cost the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company about $500 million, although the company received much of that back in insurance cash, Tulsa World reports.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration initially cited Williams with six safety violations and proposed about $99,000 in fines. OSHA later reduced the most significant charge from a “willful” violation to a “serious” one and reduced the fines.
“I want to once again recognize our Geismar team for their dedication and perseverance throughout this complex rebuild and expansion effort,” Dearborn says. “We will now turn our efforts to reaching full production rates on the base plant and shortly thereafter ramping up the plant to the expanded production capacity of 1.95 billion pounds of ethylene per year. We look forward now to rebuilding our reputation as a safe and reliable supplier of olefins.”
