The board of directors at Huntsman Corporation has given the go-ahead for the repair and restart of the company's Port Arthur, Texas, manufacturing facility that was damaged by fire in April. The total cost of the clean-up, engineering and rebuild is estimated at $110 million.

Huntsman will also accelerate some maintenance work on the facility that was scheduled to be done during a 2010 turnaround and inspection. The company said that doing the work now will make the plant run more efficiently. The maintenance work will not extend the time required to repair and restart the facility.

President and CEO Peter Huntsman commented, "We are highly confident that we will be able to restart the facility in the second quarter of 2007.”

The Port Arthur facility has an annual production capacity of 1.4 billion pounds of ethylene and 800 million pounds of propylene.