MOSCOW (MRC) -- Air Liquide China will build new production capacities in Mianyang City (100 km Northwest of Chengdu), Sichuan Province and Chongqing City, said Chemweek.
These will supply BOE, the world’s leading company in flat-panel displays and an IoT company, in the context of new long-term supply agreements. Since 2017, Air Liquide’s total investment for BOE amounts to more than 100 million euros.
Air Liquide will build, own and operate new high-purity nitrogen production facilities with a total capacity of 75,000 Nm3/h, for BOE’s production of AMOLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) displays, a technology that is increasingly used in high-end smartphones. It will also provide volumes of oxygen, hydrogen, argon and carbon dioxide to BOE fabs in Chongqing and Mianyang. The facilities are expected to begin operations in 2021.
Leveraging Air Liquide’s most advanced technologies, and in line with its Climate Objectives, the new power-efficient nitrogen production facilities are expected to have a reduced power consumption by 10% compared to previous units, which is equivalent to avoiding CO2 emissions of over 8,000 tons per year.
Since the beginning of its partnership with BOE in 2004, Air Liquide has continued to build on this relationship, with the construction of carrier gas plants on 10 sites across China to support the gas and services requirements of BOE.
Francois Abrial, member of the Air Liquide Group’s Executive Committee supervising Asia-Pacific, said: "Air Liquide is pleased to strengthen its over 15-year long partnership with BOE, which testifies of our ability to provide unique technical expertise as well as safe and reliable service to our clients over the long term. Air Liquide is a provider of innovative solutions for the growing electronics industry, particularly in the context of world deployment of 5G networks. Thanks to these new production capacities, the Group will not only support a strategic customer, but will also contribute to the development of an industry which is well established in the southwest of China."
As MRC informed earlier, in September 2020, Air Liquide finalised an agreement with Sasol to acquire the biggest oxygen production site in the world with a plan to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30%. After the announcement on July 29, the international major industry gas company has now entered into a business purchase agreement with Sasol to acquire the oxygen production site in Secunda, South Africa.
We remind that Sasol's world-scale US ethane cracker with the capacity of 1.5 mln tonnes per year reached beneficial operation on 27 August 2019. Sasol's new cracker, the heart of LCCP, is the third and most significant of the seven LCCP facilities that came online and will provide feedstock to the company's six new derivative units at Sasol's Lake Charles multi-asset site.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020).
MRC