MOSCOW (MRC) -- China's Dushan Energy Ltd., a subsidiary of Xinfengming Group Co., Ltd, has partially started up its new 2.2 million mt/year purified terephthalic acid unit at Zhejiang Wednesday, reported S&P Global with reference ot sources familiar with the matter.
The unit consists of two trains with 1.1 million mt/year each, and the raw material paraxylene was fed into one of the trains on Wednesday morning, the sources added.
There is continuous flaring at the moment, indicating operation of the oxidation unit, one of the sources added.
The company should be able to produce some PTA materials by Thursday if the operation continues to run well, they said.
The new 2.2 million mt/year PTA unit will be the first phase of the company's Yuan 7 billion (USD1 billion) investment project, which includes another PTA line with the same capacity that will be in the second phase, the company announced in its official website earlier.
Phase two of its PTA line is expected to be online in the third quarter of 2020, sources close to the company said.
We remind that, as MRC wrote before, China's Hengli Petrochemical took off-stream its No. 1 PTA plant for a two-week turnaround on October 7, 2019. Located in Dalian, China, the No. 1 PTA plant has a production capacity of 2.2 million mt/year.
PTA is used to produce polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used in the manufacturing of plastic bottles, films, packaging containers, in the textile and food industries.
According to MRC's DataScope report, Chinese bottle grade PET deliveries to Russia increased 34% in the first eight months of 2019 to 95,600 tonnes. China accounted for 90% of the total imports, compared to 85% a year earlier.
August imports of material from China decreased by 41% to 7,600 tonnes from 12,800 tonnes in July. Jiangsu Sanfangxiang, Yisheng, Wankai and Sinopec were the leading Chinese suppliersof material to the Russian market.
MRC