MOSCOW (MRC) -- China’s State Council has announced the extension of the Lunar New Year holiday to 2 February 2020 as the country attempt to contain the new virus outbreak. The holiday originally was from 24 January to 30 January 2020, reported CommoPlast.
In some places including Shanghai and Guangdong Province, businesses would remain closed until 9 February 2020, according to the official announcement.
Meanwhile, the Education Department would issue separate notice pertaining to the resumption of schools and colleges across the country.
We remind that, as MRC wrote before, China Sinochem Group is expected to start up a new crude processing unit and a petrochemical complex in southeastern China around mid-2020, marking the state firm's first foray into making petrochemicals. The state-run oil and chemicals group is adding 60,000 barrels per day of crude processing capacity at an existing 240,000-bpd refinery in Quanzhou, Fujian province. It will also begin operations around June of a petrochemical plant, including a naphtha cracker that can produce one million tonnes per year (tpy) of ethylene. The expansion is part of a new wave of investments in China, led by private chemical giants Hengli Petrochemical and Zhejiang Rongsheng Holdings, that have boosted output of petrochemicals such as paraxylene (PX), the key raw material for synthetic fibre and water bottles. China is the world's largest petrochemical importer.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,904,410 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2019, up by 6% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. PE shipments increased from both domestic producers and foreign suppliers. The PP consumption in the Russian market was 1,161,830 tonnes in January-November 2019, up by 7% year on year. Deliveries of all grades of propylene polymers increased, with the homopolymer PP segment accounting for the largest increase.
MRC