MOSCOW (MRC) -- Qatar Petroleum, for and on behalf of Qatar Petroleum for the Sale of Petroleum Products Company (QPSPP), has concluded a five-year sale agreement with Shell International Eastern Trading Company (SIETCO), a registered business of Shell Eastern Trading (Pte) Ltd., which is based in Singapore, reported The Peninsular.
Under the agreement, QPSPP will supply SIETCO with a total of 900,000 metric tons of full-range naphtha and plant condensate per year, starting in April 2020.
H E Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, the Minister of State for Energy Affairs and the President and CEO of Qatar Petroleum, said, "We are pleased to achieve this milestone agreement in our effort to directly sell to users of our products. It is also our pleasure to expand our global relationship with SIETCO, which delivers to customers in key markets in Asia such as China and to Shell’s ethylene cracker in Singapore."
Qatar Petroleum and Shell have a long-standing strategic partnership through several shared investments in Qatar’s energy industry. This includes Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited (Qatargas 4), which produces and exports about 7.8 million tons of LNG per annum, and Pearl GTL, the world’s largest gas-to-liquids plant.
The relationship with Shell also includes strategic global partnerships, which include a petrochemical joint venture in Singapore, a joint venture to develop LNG marine fueling (bunkering) infrastructure at strategic shipping locations across the globe, as well as exploration operations in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.
As MRC wrote previously, in November 2019, Qatar Petroleum signed a 10-year Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) supply agreement with China’s Wanhua Chemicals. The agreement is for the sale of approximately 800,000 metric tons per year of LPG over a period of 10 years.
We remind that China’s top petrochemical maker Wanhua Chemical Group aims to increase LPG imports to about 5.5 million mt in 2020 from 4 million mt this year as it procures feedstock from diversified sources ahead of new projects in Yantai and widens trading activities in Asia.
A 1 million mt/year ethylene integration project - phase two of its petrochemical project in northeast Shandong province - will be the first ethylene cracker to use LPG as feedstock globally and is set for commercial production in the second half of 2020. Together with associated downstream units and a nearby feedstock storage rock cavern with a capacity of 1.2 million cubic meters, the project is costing around Yuan 20 billion.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,724,670 tonnes in the first ten months of 2019, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market in January-October 2019 totalled 1,066,520 tonnes, up by 7% year on year. Supply of block copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymer) and homopolymer of propylene (homopolymer PP) increased, demand for statistical copolymers (PP random copolymer) decreased.
MRC