Clariant upgrades facility in Midland, Texas

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Clariant, a world leader in specialty chemicals, announced the inauguration of a new state-of-the-art laboratory at its facility in Midland, Texas, as per Hydrocarbonengineering.

This capital investment upgraded several key infrastructure elements of the operations centre. Most prominent is the state-of-the-art laboratory, which is Clariant Oil Services fourth Regional Technical Laboratory in North America. The laboratory has almost doubled in size and is now equipped with industry-leading research and automation equipment. As such, it will increase sample activity undertaken for regional Permian Basin oil and gas producers by up to 45% over the pre-existing test centre.

"The significant investment made at Midland follows on from our major upgrade in Clinton, Oklahoma announced earlier this year,” said John Dunne, Global Head of Oil & Mining Services, Clariant. “It is further testament to Clariant’s strengthened commitment to grow with our customers located in the Permian and Mid-Con regions, which are both strategically important in the US market."

The new laboratory is unique within North America in having on-site access to two inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) units, state of the art solids identification equipment, including X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), and many other industry leading instruments. All of these are designed to allow Clariant’s chemical specialists to process around 7000 lab samples per month out of this local Permian based lab and meet its customer expectations for turnaround times. Due to the complexity of unconventional shale production in the Permian basin, this equipment gives Clariant the ability to quickly assess risk factors associated with flow assurance, asset integrity, and oil/water quality, in order to rapidly develop solutions that lower overall cost of operations for its customers. Close proximity to the Clariant technical experts on-site and the local operators ensures real time customer interaction, while providing simultaneous trouble-shooting to ensure chemical efficacy, such as scale prevention and paraffin inhibition.

In addition to its showcase laboratory, Clariant will be able to provide increased support to its customers through a newly operational blending plant, ensuring security of supply and the flexibility to produce bespoke products. An upgraded tank farm, 10-bay fleet maintenance facility and enhanced customer sales offices will also augment Clariant’s service offerings to customers in the fastest growing oil basin in the US.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Celanese Corporation, a global specialty materials company, has increase October list and off-list selling prices for Vinyl Acetate Monomer (VAM) sold in Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Americas, as per the company"s press release.

The price increases below were effective for orders shipped on or after October 1, 2018, or as contracts otherwise allow, and are incremental to any previously announced increases.

Thus, VAM prices rose, as follows:

- by EUR50/mt - for Europe, Middle East & Africa;
- by USD0.03/lb - for the USA and Canada:
- by USD65/mt - for Mexico & South America.

As MRC reported earlier, Celanese last raised its VAM prices for the stated above regions on 1 July, 2018, as follows:

- by EUR100/mt - for Europe, Middle East & Africa;
- by USD0.05/lb - for the USA and Canada:
- by USD110/mt - for Mexico & South America.

Celanese Corporation is a global technology leader in the production of differentiated chemistry solutions and specialty materials used in most major industries and consumer applications. Based in Dallas, Celanese employs approximately 7,600 employees worldwide and had 2017 net sales of USD6.1 billion.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities in Yanbu are operating normally and safely, an Aramco spokesman said, after unconfirmed reports on Twitter about an explosion at an oil refinery in the Saudi port city, reported Reuters.

The spokesman said there was no such incident at Aramco facilities.

As MRC informed previously, a proposed reshuffle of state assets would allow Saudi Arabia to delay the listing of national oil giant Aramco until 2020 or beyond while still spending on economic development projects, said three sources familiar with the matter in late July 2018. A week earlier, Aramco confirmed a Reuters report that it was working on a possible purchase of a "strategic stake" in local petrochemicals maker Saudi Basic Industries Corp (2010.SE) from the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s top sovereign wealth fund. The deal could inject tens of billions of dollars into the PIF, giving it resources to proceed with its plans to create jobs and diversify the economy beyond oil exports, including a USD500 billion business zone in the northwest of the country.

Saudi Aramco is an integrated oil and chemicals company, a global leader in hydrocarbon production, refining processes and distribution, as well as one of the largest global oil exporters. It manages proven reserves of crude oil and condensate estimated at 261.1bn barrels, and produces 9.54 million bbl daily. Headquartered in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the company employs over 61,000 staff in 77 countries.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- LyondellBasell has announced that Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical Co. Ltd (ZPCC) has selected LyondellBasell’s polypropylene (PP), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) technologies for five new plants, said Hydrocarbonengineering.

The plants will be built in ZPCC’s petrochemical complex in Zhoushan City, China.

The complex will include two 450 000 tpy PP plants that will use LyondellBasell’s Spherizone PP process technology and two LDPE plants, 300 000 and 400 000 tpy respectively, which will use Lupotech T process technology. The complex will also include a 350 000 tpy HDPE plant which will use Hostalen ACP process technology.

At a total capacity of almost 2 million t, these new licenses constitute the largest volume of new capacity ever licensed by LyondellBasell in a single location.

As MRC wrote previously, in August 2016, LyondellBasell made the final investment decision to build a high density polyethylene (HDPE) plant on the US Gulf Coast. The plant will have an annual capacity of 1.1 billion pounds (500,000 metric tons) and will be the first commercial plant to employ LyondellBasell's new proprietary Hyperzone PE technology. The start-up of the new plant is scheduled for 2019.

LyondellBasell is one of the largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies in the world. Driven by its 13,000 employees around the globe, LyondellBasell produces materials and products that are key to advancing solutions to modern challenges like enhancing food safety through lightweight and flexible packaging, protecting the purity of water supplies through stronger and more versatile pipes, and improving the safety, comfort and fuel efficiency of many of the cars and trucks on the road. LyondellBasell sells products into approximately 100 countries and is the world's largest licensor of polyolefin technologies.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Siemens Water Solutions has received an order for a complete wastewater treatment system for Tianjin Bohua Chemical Development’s (a subsidiary of Bohai Chemical Group) new propylene oxide-styrene monomer (POSM) plant, as per Hydrocarbonengineering.

The plant, located at the Nangang Industrial Zone in northern China’s Tianjin, will have a production capacity of 200 000 tpy of propylene oxide (PO) and 450 000 tpy of styrene monomer (SM).

Tianjin Bohua Chemical is building the grassroots petrochemical plant using technology licensed from REPSOL in Spain, for which Siemens Water Solutions previously provided a complete wastewater treatment system that included a Zimpro® wet air oxidation (WAO) system; and PACT® and wet air regeneration (WAR) systems.

Siemens will supply two Zimpro WAO systems; a true 2-stage (T2S) PACT membrane bioreactor (MBR); ozone oxidation; and WAR systems on the Nangang Industrial Zone project.

Effluent from the wastewater treatment system will be discharged into Bohai Bay, which is the subject of water quality improvement initiatives by the Chinese government, limiting the allowable chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentration in the discharge to less than 30 ppm.
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