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Spot European ethylene spot prices have been fairly stable in August, bucking the general trend of a fall over the summer-vacation period, tracking feedstock naphtha higher and in anticipation of upcoming cracker outages, sources said.

Spot prices reached Eur894/mt on Friday, up Eur21 on the day and unchanged since August 5. Over the same period last year they fell 13%. In three of the past five years prices have fallen in August.

Naphtha, the primary feedstock of ethylene has risen 19% since the beginning of the month to $396.25/mt CIF NWE Prices are expected to remain supported through the month on production outages. BPRP will shut one of the two steam crackers at its Gelsenkirchen, Germany, facility for maintenance on August 23 and restart early October, trade sources said Friday.

"The cracker is going down on August 23 [for maintenance]," a trader who procures volumes from BPRP said. "The BPRP cracker will remain shut till early October," another trader said. BPRP was not immediately available to comment.

There are two crackers at BPRP's Gelsenkirchen site with ethylene capacities of 562,000 mt and 484,000 mt, making up 4.4% of Western European capacity.

Furthermore, maintenance at Ineos' Grangemouth, Scotland cracker is expected to continue for another two weeks, a source close to the company said Monday. "The cracker at Grangemouth...is expected to be shutdown for another two weeks," the source said.