MOSCOW (MRC) -- Rainer Seele, CEO of Austria-based energy and petrochemicals major OMV, will leave the company next year, said the company.
The Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of OMV, Rainer Seele, has notified the Chairman of the Supervisory Board Mark Garrett that he will not make use of the extension option for one additional year. The current term of office will end automatically on June 30, 2022.
Seele has been CEO since 1 July 2015. Before that, he led BASF’s Wintershall oil and gas business. Garrett led OMV's Borealis polyolefins affiliate for 11 years before stepping down in 2018.
This structural change facilitates the forward integration in the chemicals sector that has been underway ever since OMV acquired a majority stake in Borealis. With this change, OMV is consistently positioned across the entirety of its expanded value chain and can bundle all relevant responsibilities for petrochemicals and chemicals in a single board division.
As MRC wrote before, OMV is investing EUR40 million (USD48 million) to expand and modernize a steam cracker and associated units at its refining and petrochemicals complex at Burghausen, Germany. The upgrade will increase the site’s ethylene and propylene production capacity by 50,000 metric tons/year. Following a planned turnaround of the refinery, the revamped cracker and petchem units are expected to start operations in the third quarter of 2022. Initial groundwork is already underway ahead of the upgrade.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated polyethylene (PE) consumption totalled 356,370 tonnes in the first two month of 2021, down by 9% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market was 246,870 tonnes in January-February 2021, up by 30% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased.
OMV produces and markets oil and gas, innovative energy and high-end petrochemical solutions – in a responsible way. With Group sales of EUR 23 bn and a workforce of around 20,000 employees in 2019, OMV Aktiengesellschaft is one of Austria’s largest listed industrial companies.
MRC