INOVYN has today announced the proposed closure of its sulphur chemicals plant at Runcorn Site, and its withdrawal from the UK sulphur chemicals market.
The decision follows a detailed management review of the business in light of recent unforeseen events.
In October 2020, an unexpected interruption to the third-party power supply to Runcorn Site resulted in the sulphur chemicals plant being taken offline. During a carefully controlled restart, it was identified that a number of critical plant components had suffered significant damage. As a result, to ensure the safety and integrity of the plant it was taken back offline.
Since then, and despite significant effort and investment to rectify these issues, it has become clear that it will not be possible to safely restart the plant for at least a further 18-24 months.
This extended outage affects INOVYN’s ability to supply its customers and means that it will not be in a position to continue to produce sulphur chemicals for the UK chemicals market.
Regrettably, the Company is therefore left with no option but to keep the plant offline and effect a permanent closure of the sulphur chemicals business.
There are approximately 40 employees who are aligned to the sulphur chemicals business, all of whom are covered by the Company’s social measures in the case of restructuring. We do not envisage any redundancies as we will seek to reassign those affected to suitable alternative roles.
There is no impact on other operations at Runcorn Site.
A closure plan will now be developed in conjunction with employees and their representatives. INOVYN’s sulphur chemicals customers in the UK have been informed and the Company will assist them in their transition to alternative supplies.
ENDS
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About INOVYN
Part of INEOS, INOVYN is Europe's leading producer of vinyls and in the top three worldwide. With an annual turnover of €3.1 billion, INOVYN has circa 4,200 employees and chemical manufacturing, sales and marketing operations in 8 countries across Europe.
INOVYN’s portfolio consists of an extensive range of class-leading products arranged across General Purpose Vinyls; Specialty Vinyls; Organic Chlorine Derivatives; Chlor-Alkali; Hydrogen and Vinyls Technologies. INOVYN's annual commercial production volume is circa 10 million tonnes.
See www.inovyn.com and www.ineos.com for more details.
