Quick recovery

Petrochemical plants and refineries rebound after Hurricane Harvey’s blows.

Chevron Phillips has completed its new plastics plants, but a large portion of the $6 billion expansion in the Houston area is being delayed until next year after Hurricane Harvey’s waters created problems.

Chevron Phillips Chemical Co., a joint venture of Chevron and Phillips 66, said it just finished building two polyethylene plastics units southwest of Houston in Old Ocean by Phillips 66’s Sweeny complex. The company said it is initiating the startup process for the units.

The larger Baytown portion of the expansion project, originally expected to be finished by now, won’t be completed until next year, Chevron Phillips said. The project involves a massive ethane cracker to separate a component of natural gas called ethane, which in turn would provide Chevron Phillips the feedstock to produces some 1.5 million metric tons a year of ethylene, a building block of plastics. The ethane cracker is being built on a plot the size of 44 football fields.

The project had experienced some delays earlier, but Harvey’s flooding of much of Baytown exacerbated them. Chevron Phillips said it is on track to complete the project by March and produce at full capacity by mid-2018.

“We were very close to completion and in the final stages, even beginning testing,” Ron Corn, Chevron Phillips senior vice president, said at an industry conference Thursday. “Then Mr. Harvey hit us pretty hard.”

The project is the biggest to date for Chevron Phillips, headquartered in The Woodlands. It is expected to create 400 permanent jobs on top of 10,000 temporary construction positions.

The complex is part of a petrochemical boom primarily along the Gulf Coast, where manufacturers can take advantage of cheap natural gas, the feedstock for their products, as well as ports to export to growing markets in Asia.

jordan.blum@chron.com twitter.com/jdblum23