MOSCOW (MRC) -- A U.S. subsidiary of state-owned Thai oil and gas company PTT PCL said that it was focused on finding a partner for its proposed petrochemical plant in Ohio that will turn ethane into plastics, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
“The focus of the project is finding a partner. There are very substantive conversations going on with a number of companies that the project team feels good about,” said Dan Williamson, a spokesman for the project. He said he could not share the names of those companies at this time.
Williamson also said the team was in the process of meeting with members of President Joe Biden’s administration to brief them on the benefits of the project, which will cost an estimated $10 billion to build and create hundreds of full-time jobs and thousands of construction jobs.
He also noted that renewables would be part of the project. Last summer, PTT’s PTT Global Chemical America (PTTGCA) subsidiary delayed making a final investment decision to build the ethane cracker from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Williamson said the company still hopes to make a final investment decision during the first half of 2021 but noted that time frame is a “reasonable hope” and not a “set in stone” prediction. If it were not for the pandemic, the company has said the plant would likely already be under construction.
The ethane cracker is designed to produce about 1.5 million metric tons of ethylene per year and will take 4-6 years to build. In addition to PTTGCA’s project, Royal Dutch Shell PLC is building an ethane cracker nearby in western Pennsylvania that is expected to enter service in the early 2020s.
As per MRC, PTT Global Chemical has put plans for the construction of a massive petrochemical plant in eastern Ohio on hold while it conducts another feasibility study. The proposed project, which was announced in 2015, has faced a series of delays.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report, PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports.
PTT Global Chemical is a leading player in the petrochemical industry and owns several petrochemical facilities with a combined capacity of 8.45 million tonnes a year.
MRC