MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi Basic Industries (SABIC), the world's fourth-biggest petrochemicals firm, said its joint venture project with ExxonMobil in the US Gulf Coast has started commissioning activities and preparing for an initial startup, reported Reuters.
The project includes the establishment of an ethylene production unit with annual capacity of about 1.8 MMtpy, which will feed two polyethylene (PE) units and a monoethylene glycol (MEG) unit, it said in a statement.
SABIC expects that this project will have a positive impact on its consolidated financial statements after the commercial operation begins.
It supports SABIC's strategy to diversify its feedstock sources and strength its petrochemical manufacturing presence in North America for a wide range of products, it said.
As MRC informed earlier, in late July 2021, ExxonMobil and SABIC announced that their JV, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures located near Corpus Christi, Texas, had reached mechanical completion of a MEG unit and two PE units.
We remind that a little more than two years after announcing it had selected San Patricio County as the site for its new ethylene cracker plant, ExxonMobil and SABIC celebrated the groundbreaking for the new facility (September 2019).
ExxonMobil is the largest non-government owned company in the energy industry and produces about 3% of the world's oil and about 2% of the world's energy.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) ranks among the world's top petrochemical companies. The company is among the world's market leaders in the production of polyethylene, polypropylene and other advanced thermoplastics, glycols, methanol and fertilizers.
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