Dallas, May 14, 2007 - Celanese Corporation today announced that it has temporarily ceased production of acetic acid at its Clear Lake, Texas manufacturing facility due to an unplanned outage.
The company currently expects the acetic acid unit to resume operations by the end of May. The company has informed its customers of this force majeure event and is actively working to minimize the impact of the shutdown on its customers' operations.
The company currently does not expect the shutdown to materially affect Celanese's financial performance for the full year, but it may have a modest impact on second quarter results. The facility has an annual production capacity of approximately 1.2 million tons and is one of five acetic acid facilities in the company’s global production system.