LG Chem targets zero major environmental, safety accidents from 2021

MOSCOW (MRC) -- LG Chem says it will establish a "global standard" for environmental safety and expand it to the company's business sites worldwide. LG Chem has also announced that it will reestablish its environmental safety standards for all its business sites globally and considerably strengthen its management system, said Chemweek.

LG Chem says that it is currently activating its M-Project, a large-scale safety initiative involving in-company environmental safety and process technology experts, as well as external agencies specialized in related fields, with the goal of achieving zero major environmental and safety accidents from 2021. The decision to execute the project followed the company's announcement in May that it would carry out safety inspections at all its sites worldwide following recent accidents in India and South Korea.

The company says that the new safety standards that will be applied to all its business sites around the world will be of “highest levels, while going beyond simply complying with local laws and regulations but managing it at global standards."

The company says that it has completed emergency diagnoses on high-risk processes and equipment at its 37 business sites—15 in South Korea and 22 overseas—and come up with a total of 590 cases for improvement. It is also investing a total of 81 billion South Korean won (USD5 billion) in environmental safety measures in 2020 to take immediate action for the necessary improvements detected during the inspections. In addition, about W235 billion will be invested every year by the company in environmental safety.

LG Chem aims to focus on developing technologies to identify signs of accidents in advance, using big data. Pilot facilities have been constructed at the company's Yeosu and Daesan, South Korea, petrochemical complexes to test digital transformation technologies. LG Chem plans to expand these applications to its other business sites and plants by next year.

LG Chem will also centralize the management of its budget and investments for environmental safety from each of its subsidiaries to a corporate environmental safety organization by the end of this year. There are also plans to restructure the handling of environmental safety across the company to strengthen the prevention of accidents, it adds.

"We have been focused on creating a fundamental countermeasure with the belief that there will be no future for us if we fail to ensure environmental safety,” says LG Chem CEO Hak-Cheol Shin. “We will focus all our energies on systemizing highly intense environmental-safety policies that we prepared with the mindset that we will not operate unless safe."

We remind that LG Chem, a South Korean petrochemical major, reduced its operational rates of its cracker to around 90-95% starting January 2020 due to weaker economic fundamentals. Based in Daesan, South Korea, the cracker is able to produce 1.27 million tons/year of ethylene and 650,000 tons/year of propylene. The company increased capacity utilisation at this cracker to 100% on 10 March, 2020, in order to supply ethylene to Lotte Chemical.

Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

According to MRC's DataScope report, PE imports to Russia dropped in January-June 2020 by 7% year on year to 328,000 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the main decrease in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia rose in the first six months of 2020 by 21% year on year to 105,300 tonnes. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports.

MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Tomskneftekhim, a subsidiary of SIBUR Holding, started a scheduled shutdown for maintenance at its low density polyethylene (LDPE) and polypropylene (PP) production capacities on 2 September, according to ICIS-MRC Price report.

The plant's representatives said the outage was scheduled and would last for about two weeks. The plant plans to modernize its polyethylene (PE) production by means of repairs.

Tomskneftekhim did not reduce output of its own products during the COVID-19 pandemic, said the plant's CEO Andrey Kugaevsky in late June. There was no significant reduction in shipments of material to end consumers either, despite the temporary closure of the borders of certain countries and regions. At the same time, Tomskneftekhim postponed the shutdown for a turnaround from 15 June to 2 September due to the situation with the spread of coronavirus infection.

According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Tomskneftekhim produced 23,200 tonnes of LDPE in July versus 23,700 tonnes a month earlier. The Tomsk plant's overall LDPE output reached 160,660 tonnes in January-July 2020, up by 4.6% year on year (154,590 tonnes).

LLC "Tomskneftekhim" was opened after the transformation of TNHK in 2003. It is a subsidiary of PJSC SIBUR-Holding, which is one of the backbone enterprises of the Russian Federation. The size of Tomskneftekhim's authorized capital was Rb6.5 billion in 2019, sales revenue - Rb13.2 billion, net profit - Rb1.9 billion.
MRC

1. Tomskneftekhim shut PE and PP production

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Tomskneftekhim, a subsidiary of SIBUR Holding, started a scheduled shutdown for maintenance at its low density polyethylene (LDPE) and polypropylene (PP) production capacities on 2 September, according to ICIS-MRC Price report. The plant's representatives said the outage was scheduled and would last for about two weeks. The plant plans to modernize its polyethylene (PE) production by means of repairs. Tomskneftekhim did not reduce output of its own products during the COVID-19 pandemic, said the plant's CEO Andrey Kugaevsky in late June. There was no significant reduction in shipments of material to end consumers either, despite the temporary closure of the borders of certain countries and regions. At the same time, Tomskneftekhim postponed the shutdown for a turnaround from 15 June to 2 September due to the situation with the spread of coronavirus infection.

2. Citgo has no plans to idle damaged Lake Charles refinery, furlough workers

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Citgo Petroleum Corp said it is not planning to idle its 418,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Lake Charles, Louisiana, refinery damaged by Hurricane Laura, reported Reuters. Rumors have circulated since Laura’s passage over the Lake Charles area on Aug. 27 that Citgo was considering shutting the refinery for an indefinite period because of the extent of the damage and continuing low demand for motor fuels in the COVID-19 pandemic.


MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Trinseo, a global materials company and manufacturer of plastics, latex binders, and synthetic rubber, and its affiliate companies in Europe, have announced a price increase for all polystyrene (PS), acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) and acrylonitrile-styrene copolymer (SAN) in Europe, according to the company's press release as of 4 September.

Effective September 1, 2020, or as existing contract terms allow, the contract and spot prices for the products listed below rose as follows:

- STYRON general purpose polystyrene grades (GPPS) -- by EUR30 per metric ton;
- STYRON and STYRON A-Tech and STYRON X- Tech and STYRON C- Tech high impact polystyrene grades (HIPS) - by EUR30 per metric ton;
- MAGNUM ABS resins - by EUR35 per metric ton;
- TYRIL SAN resins - by EUR30 per metric ton.

As MRC informed before, Trinseo raised its prices for all PS grades on 1 August 2020, as stated below:

- STYRON GPPS -- by EUR30 per metric ton;
- STYRON and STYRON A-Tech and STYRON X- Tech and STYRON C- Tech HIPS - by EUR30 per metric ton;
- MAGNUM ABS resins - by EUR50 per metric ton;
- TYRIL SAN resins - by EUR40 per metric ton.

According to ICIS-MRC Price report, prices of Russian PS went up in September. Demand for material still significantly exceeded supply. Buyers reported an increase of Rb5,000/tonne in prices of Nizhnekamskneftekhim's PS this month. Penoplex's selling GPPS prices also rose by Rb5,000/tonne in September to Rb88,000-90,000/tonne CPT Moscow, including VAT.

Trinseo is a global materials company and manufacturer of plastics, latex and rubber. Trinseo's technology is used by customers in industries such as home appliances, automotive, building & construction, carpet, consumer electronics, consumer goods, electrical & lighting, medical, packaging, paper & paperboard, rubber goods and tires. Formerly known as Styron, Trinseo completed its renaming process in 1Q 2015. Trinseo had approximately USD3.8 billion in net sales in 2019, with 17 manufacturing sites around the world, and approximately 2,700 employees.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- An ongoing power outage due to Hurricane Laura has prevented a return to normal operations at a Louisiana site of the US emergency oil reserve, reported Reuters with reference to a US Energy Department official said.

The West Hackberry site, one of four locations of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, was shut before Laura hit the region to evacuate personnel. On Monday, the department said the site had “sustained considerable damage” from the storm but that there was “no threat to the integrity of the geologically sealed underground caverns” that store crude oil.

The site is staffed and secured, and damage assessment has begun, the official said. Estimates on repair times, costs and when the facility would be back to normal were not available.

West Hackberry has 21 caverns and a storage capacity of 220 million barrels of crude. The SPR currently holds nearly 650 million barrels of mostly sour crude, well over the level required by international agreements.

The SPR can still facilitate any emergency exchanges requests from refineries through its Big Hill, Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw sites, the department has said, though the reserve has not received any such requests.

Washington funded the building of the SPR in the 1970s, after the Arab oil embargo spiked gasoline prices and damaged the U.S. economy. The Energy Department has occasionally held emergency sales and loans of oil to companies in the wake of storms. Most recently it loaned oil after Hurricane Harvey inundated Texas in 2017.

As MRC informed earlier, most chemical production facilities in the region between Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, have shut down in preparation for Hurricane Laura, which was forecast to make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border last Wednesday night or early Thursday. Several olefin crackers and associated derivative polymer units have been shut down, as has about 2.5 million b/d of refining capacity.

Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's overall PE production totalled 1,712,400 tonnes in the first seven months of 2020, up by 58% year on year. Linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) accounted for the greatest increase in the output. At the same time, overall PP production in Russia increased in January-July 2020 by 24% year on year to 1,063,700 tonne. ZapSibNeftekhim accounted for the main increase in the output.
MRC