MOSCOW (MRC) -- BASF will increase its production capacity for the chemical intermediate 1,4-butanediol (BDO) by 10% at its site in Geismar, Louisiana, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to the company's announcement.
The expansion is expected to be complete in 2016.
The company will then have a global capacity of BDO of 670,000 tpy. Additionally, BASF says it is looking into further measures to strengthen and to expand its BDO value chain at the Geismar site.
Besides its Geismar site, BASF is also producing BDO at its sites in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Kuantan, Malaysia, Caojing, China and Chiba, Japan.
In addition, a new BDO site of a joint venture of BASF and the Chinese company Xinjiang Markor is expected to commence operations of 100,000 tpy by 2015.
"Being the leading producer of BDO globally, we continue to expand our production capacity step wise to support the growth of our customers as a reliable partner", said Stefan Blank, president of BASF's intermediates division.
BDO is used for producing plastics, solvents, electronic chemicals and elastic fibers. Depending on the production technology, the starting materials for the production of conventional BDO are natural gas, coal, butane, butadiene and propylene.
As MRC wrote before, in October 2014, BASF and Archroma agreed on the sale of BASF’s global textile chemicals business to Archroma, a supplier of specialty chemicals to the textile, paper and emulsions industries.
BASF is the leading chemical company. It produces a wide range of chemicals, for example solvents, amines, resins, glues, electronic-grade chemicals, industrial gases, basic petrochemicals and inorganic chemicals. The most important customers for this segment are the pharmaceutical, construction, textile and automotive industries. BASF had sales of about EUR74 billion in 2013 and over 112,000 employees as of the end of the year.
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