MOSCOW (MRC) -- China's Sinopec Corp said on Wednesday it plans to build a 1-MMtpy crude-to-olefin plant, having completed successful trial processing crude oil directly into olefin at its subsidiary plant in Tianjin, without giving further details, reported Reuters.
Thus, the top Asian refiner is one of the world's few companies that have applied the technology at an industrial scale. ExxonMobil is another firm equipped with such technology, Sinopec said.
With a yield of close to 50%, the manufacturing process cuts significantly production cost as well as CO2 emissions, compared with the traditional approach of refining crude into intermediate fuels which are further processed into olefin, Sinopec added.
Olefin - mainly ethylene and propylene - is the key building block for making petrochemicals such as plastics and synthetic fibre.
China, the world's largest emitter of green house gases, is expected to cap its primary crude oil refining capacity at 1 B tons annually by 2025 (20 MMbpd), under a national goal to hit carbon emission peak before 2030. But it remains short of petrochemicals such as plastics and synthetic fibre.
As MRC informed before, in August, 2021, Sinopec, the world's petrochemical major, launched the first phase of the Gulei refining complex in Zhangzhou city in China’s southeastern Fujian province. The refining complex, a 50:50 joint venture between Sinopec’s Fujian Petrochemical Company Ltd and Taiwan Xuteng Investment Company Ltd, invested 27.8 billion yuan (USD4.28 billion) in the first phase. That will result in an 800,000 tonnes per annum ethylene plant, a 600,000 tonnes per annum styrene unit and seven other downstream petrochemical units, Sinopec said.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,868,160 tonnes in the first nine months of 2021, up by 18% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 1,138,510 tonnes in January-September 2021, up by 30% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of injection moulding statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) decreased significantly.
China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec Group) is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical enterprise group established in July 1998 on the basis of the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Sinopec Group's key business activities include the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, petrochemicals and other chemical products, oil refining.
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