PTT to buy a stake in Indonesian petrochemicals maker PT Chandra Asri

(Reuters) -- Thailand's top energy firm, PTT Pcl , is keen to buy a stake in Indonesian petrochemicals maker PT Chandra Asri as part of its foreign expansion drive, a source at the Energy Ministry said on Friday.

"PTT group has shown interest and is studying the possibility of buying the stake in the Indonesian petrochemical firm from Temasek," the source told Reuters.

"This should be the starting point for PTT to expand into the petrochemical business in Indonesia," he said, adding PTT group was not yet in talks with the seller and had not mandated any financial adviser for the moment.

Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings is trying to sell its 23 percent stake in the Indonesian petrochemicals maker in a deal worth USD 400 million, two sources with direct knowledge of the deal told Reuters recently.

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(Plastemart) -- Royal Dutch Shell has planned to build a new world-scale ethylene cracker in the Appalachia region of US as the vast area of natural gas implanted in the Marcellus Shale are changing region's fortunes by encouraging global energy. The three locations Shell is eyeing for the crackers are Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. Shell owns the natural gas rights for about 700,000 gross acres in the Marcellus, mostly in Pennsylvania, as per icis.com. According to a company official US natural gas is "abundant and affordable," and the company has the know-how to develop this crucial energy resource, along with its associated product polyethylene (PE), for the domestic market.

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(Plastemart) -- Evonik Industries and Saudi Acrylic Acid Company (SAAC) have established a joint venture called Saudi Acrylic Polymers Company (SAPCo) for the production of superabsorbents. SAAC is a joint venture of the Saudi companies National Industrialization Company (Tasnee) and Sahara Petrochemicals. The production facility with the capacity of 80,000 metric tpa is scheduled to begin production in late 2013. The total investment will be in the triple-digit million Euro range. The EPC-contract will be assigned to Fluor. The SAPCo superabsorbent production is part of a new acrylic acid and derivative complex on the Tasnee premises of the Al Jubail Chemical Park in Saudi Arabia and will benefit from favorably priced propylene feedstock from the adjacent cracking facility operated jointly by Tasnee, Sahara and Lyondell Basell.

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(Yonhap) -- South Korean chemicals maker SK Global Chemical Co. said Friday that it broke ground for a petrochemical plant in Singapore that will serve as the company's production base in the Asian region.

Jurong Aromatics Corp. Pte. (JAC), a joint venture of SK Group's affiliates and other global firms, will funnel US$2.4 billion into the plant to be built in a petrochemical complex on Singapore's Jurong Island.

The plant will have an annual production capacity of 4 million tons of petrochemicals -- 2.6 million tons of refined oil products such as jet fuel and liquefied petroleum gas and 1.4 million tons of chemicals such as paraxylene and benzene, SK Global Chemical said.

The plant will begin operations in the third half of 2014, the company said.

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(Chemical Engineering) -- Air Liquide (Paris) announced that its engineering and construction division has signed a contract with the Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group (SNCG; China) to build a 500 KTa methanol-to-propylene (MTP) plant. The new plant will follow the successful commissioning of the first industrial scale unit built with the same client.

The contract comprises the basic engineering, license and supply of proprietary equipment, as well as services for procurement and technical advisory services at the site. The large-scale MTP plant is based on technology licensed by Lurgi. SNCG, in close cooperation with the Lurgi team, played an important role in the commissioning and startup phases of the first MTP plant, thereby helping to prove the success of the Lurgi MTP technology at industrial scale.


The unit will be built in Ningdong, in the Chinese province of Ningxia. The engineering phase for the contract is to be completed within about eight months.

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