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Enron Mail |
They will be doing a lot of maintenance activity at the plant this month.
Unfortunately, much of the key material needed to do the full turnaround needs several months lead time. For example, we have already ordered the catalyst for the turnaround scheduled in March. We discussed this yesterday with David Bush, the plant manager, and he said they would do what they could in December, but the critical path items would not be available until closer to March. The MTBE plant will be going down December 15th and the maintenance (spooge clean up) has been accelerated so we can come back up in Mid January to take advantage of an expected increase in MTBE margins. As far as longer term shut down considerations go, no one seems to have a good grasp on what the methanol market will do. Obviously, domestic production will be curtailed which should lift prices. If prices rise and January gas prices fall back below $6.00, then we would probably come back up in January. Regarding staffing effort, particularly in my group, the shutdown does not significantly impact the accountants and with a high vacation time and year-end coming up, their plates are pretty full. At the plant, the purchasers, contract administrator and A/P folks will actually be busier trying to get materials and contracts for both outages settled, especially with the timing change for the MTBE outage. Let me know if you want to discuss this further. Rod Hayslett 12/05/2000 08:35 AM To: Kerry Roper/GPGFIN/Enron@ENRON cc: Denis Tu/FGT/Enron@ENRON Subject: Re: Methanol Plant Shut Down Thanks. I think we need to be looking at the "accelerating of the maintenance" question as well. If there is a possibility that the economic world has changed and there will be a longer shut down of the facilities, does it make sense to do that work now? What are the decision points that we need to have information on in order to make that determination? Should we set up a small group to come up with an answer to this question? Should we also be looking at what we could do to reduce the staffing by reassigning some of the people to other things and minimizing the effort expended against Clean Fuels, particularly in your group? Kerry Roper 12/05/2000 08:25 AM To: Rod Hayslett/FGT/Enron@ENRON cc: Subject: Methanol Plant Shut Down FYI only - We are shutting the methanol plant down for the month and are selling the natural gas back for $7.73. Kerry
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