African Oxygen Limited (Afrox) recently announced that it would like to confirm the current shortage of acetylene will persist at least until end June 2019.

Afrox is taking every measure possible to resolve the situation and expedite the importation of the carbide raw material and resumption of acetylene production at their acetylene production plants. Afrox expects production of acetylene and supply to customers to start normalizing by July 2019.

Afrox explained “Afrox already secured sufficient Carbide on the international spot market to resume Dissolved Acetylene (DA) production in the first week of June and ahead of our original estimates. This means supply of DA will resume before 10 June 2019. It will however take a few weeks to restock our supply chain to meet all demand and we estimate normalised DA supply levels will be achieved between end June and early July 2019.”