MOSCOW (MRC) -- South Africa's Environmental Ministry said on Wednesday it would investigate whether petrochemical company Sasol's Secunda operations could be the source of a sulfur smell experienced in parts of Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces since the weekend, reported Reuters.
The Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries said the smell was likely a combination of elevated levels of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.
Sasol said in a statement on its website on Tuesday that its Secunda operations did not have any operational incidents that could have resulted in an increase in sulfur emissions.
The company said it had also started an investigation to assist in identifying the area of origin of the sulfur odor experienced in the region. Sasol said it could not immediately comment further.
The ministry said it would decide on any further course of action once the investigations were completed.
As MRC wrote previously, 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 Lake Charles Chemicals Project (LCCP), is the third and most significant of the seven LCCP facilities to come online and will provide feedstock to the company's six new derivative units at its 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). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
Sasol is an international integrated chemicals and energy company that leverages technologies and the expertise of our 31 270 people working in 32 countries. The company develops and commercialises technologies, and builds and operates world-scale facilities to produce a range of high-value product stream, including liquid fuels, petrochemicals and low-carbon electricity.
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