RIL Board recommends appointment of Isha Ambani, Akash Ambani and Anant Ambani on the Board of Directors

Nita Ambani to step down from the Board to continue as Chairperson of Reliance Foundation, said Polymerupdate.

The Board of Directors of RIL, at its meeting held today, on the recommendation of the Human Resources, Nomination and Remuneration Committee, considered and recommended to the shareholders for approval of appointment of Isha Ambani, Akash Ambani and Anant Ambani as Non-Executive Directors of the Company. Their appointment will take effect from the date they assume office after approval by the shareholders.

The Board of Directors also accepted the resignation of Nita Ambani from the Board respecting her decision to devote her energies and time to guide and enable Reliance Foundation to make even greater impact for India. The Board of Directors appreciated Nita Ambani for her leadership of Reliance Foundation as its Founder Chairperson. Over the years, RF has made considerable progress in its mission of nurturing and empowering marginalised and under-resourced communities in India. They lauded Nita Ambani’s request to focus even more on strengthening Reliance Foundation as it embarks on a mission to achieve even greater societal transformation by undertaking a host of new programmes and initiatives.

As the Chairperson of Reliance Foundation, Nita Ambani will attend all the RIL Board meetings as a permanent invitee to the Board so that the Company can continue to benefit from her advice.

Isha Ambani, Akash Ambani and Anant Ambani have been closely involved with and are leading and managing key businesses of RIL over the last few years including retail, digital services and energy and materials businesses. They also serve on the boards of the key subsidiaries of RIL. Their appointment to the Board of RIL will enable RIL to gain from their insights and infuse new ideas, the Board opined.

We remind, Reliance Industries Ltd has turned its sights on the domestic market, offering a high-performance diesel at a lower price than fuel sold by state-owned retailers. Jio-bp, the retail fuel joint venture of Reliance and bp will sell diesel mixed with detergents and dispersants at 1 rupee cheaper per liter than gasoil sold by the state-run companies, such as, Hindustan Petroleum Corp and Bharat Petroleum.

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LANXESS has reached an important step towards more sustainability in its plasticizer portfolio: The Polymer Additives (PLA) business unit now offers a more sustainable solution for its plasticizer Mesamoll, said the company.

The phthalate-free, well-gelling and exceptionally saponification-resistant plasticizer can be applied for a wide range of polymers, such as PVC, PUR and rubber.

“The switch to a more sustainable raw material base in the production of Mesamoll is a testament to LANXESS’s commitment to sustainability,” says Karsten Job, Head of the Polymer Additives business. “Helping our customers to reduce their carbon footprint while meeting the demands of our customers for phthalate-free, reliable, and performing solutions makes us a frontrunner in the market.”

In the future, more than 30 percent of the input materials for Mesamoll will come from fully sustainable sources resulting in a reduction in the product carbon footprint (PCF) of around 20 percent. As this is calculated via the mass balance approach by the supplier of the respective raw materials, there is no impact on the product quality or performance of Mesamoll.

“We want to actively shape the transformation of our industry,” says Stefan Tiebach, Head of Global Marketing at PLA. “At LANXESS, we firmly believe in leading by example and that is why we decided to stop the distribution of our conventional Mesamoll and are solely distributing the more sustainable version starting on October 1, 2023. Our customers will continue to receive the usual product quality with the additional benefit of an improved sustainability profile.”

LANXESS is committed to further reduce the PCF for its plasticizer Mesamoll in the future, even though the current, reduced PCF is significantly lower than most alternative plasticizers on the market.

We remind, LANXESS has doubled its production capacity for benzyl alcohol at its site in Kalama, WA, US, to support the growth of its established customer base in the Americas. The capacity expansion is the result of various technical upgrades. LANXESS also produces benzyl alcohol at its sites in Krefeld-Uerdingen (Germany), Botlek (Netherlands), and Nagda (India).

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Asia's top refiner, Sinopec Corp, is not interested in acquiring Shell's refinery or petrochemical plant in Singapore although it is keen on participating in a shale gas project in Saudi Arabia, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Sinopec President Yu Baocai was speaking after sources last week told Reuters that Shell had hired Goldman Sachs to advise on a potential sale of its Singapore assets and that Sinopec was among the companies reviewing them.

However, Yu, speaking at a briefing in Hong Kong after the state-run oil and gas giant reported a 20% decline in interim earnings, said that Sinopec is interested in participating in Saudi Arabia's Jafurah shale gas project.

This is in line with an earlier Reuters report saying Sinopec and TotalEnergies were in separate discussions with state-run Saudi Aramco to invest in the Jafurah project, the largest shale gas development outside the U.S., with reserves estimated at 200 trillion cubic feet of raw gas.

Yu also said that Sinopec was one of the international companies invited by the Sri Lankan government to build a refinery there, and that it was evaluating the matter. Sri Lanka shortlisted Sinopec and commodities trader Vitol to become potential investors in a proposed export-oriented refinery in Hambantota.

Separately, Sinopec is set to start operating a retail fuel business in the island nation next month. Yu also said that Russian oil makes up a small fraction of Sinopec's international crude purchases and that it will make "dynamic adjustment" in future buying based on the global market situation.

Chinese refiners have benefited from cheap crude oil supplies from Iran, Venezuela and Russia as Western sanctions have forced those producers to sell oil at deep discounts to keep revenue flowing. Although Chinese state majors have shied away from Iranian and Venezuelan oil, Sinopec has been taking in Russian supplies, traders have said.

We remind, Sinopec reported a 10.5% year-on-year increase in first-half 2022 net profit on the back of strong crude, even as its chemical earnings shrunk 94% as demand collapsed amid COVID-19 curbs. Strong crude and COVID-19 outbreaks dampened domestic demand for oil products in April-June 2022, with chemical operations have had to grapple with high cost, high inventory, low utilisation rates and poor margin. Ethylene consumption in the first half barely grew, logging a 0.1% year-on-year increase, while output grew 5.9% to 6.85m tonnes. Sinopec is targeting to produce 7.2m tonnes of ethylene in the second half, which will bring the full-year production to 14.05m tonnes, up 4.9% from 2021.

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Braskem and the University of Sao Paulo (USP) have announced a partnership to develop lines of research for converting CO2 into other chemical products. CO­2 is one of the greenhouse gases and among the biggest contributors to climate change, said the company.

The project's mission is to deploy the technologies resulting from these lines of research to reuse CO2 to obtain chemical products such as olefins and alcohols, thus mitigating its emissions into the environment and using it as a raw material for the production of polyolefins.

The partnership with USP, through the Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI), which also includes the participation of the Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar), focuses on studying innovative routes for CO2 conversion through both catalytic and electrocatalytic processes. While in conventional processes in the chemical industry, catalysts (materials that trigger chemical reactions) are thermally activated, electrocatalysis uses electricity to activate them. As such, renewable energy can be used partially or fully for CO2 conversion.

The project, which started one year ago, considers a total period of five years for developments on a laboratory scale, with the possibility of extension based on the progress of research.

Braskem will contribute with investments and its expertise in industrial processes, and will also monitor and guide the studies. The research groups from USP and UFSCar will coordinate and conduct the studies using state-of-the-art infrastructure at the laboratories and with assistance from multidisciplinary teams consisting of chemists, physicists, and engineers, among others, with various levels of academic qualifications.

For Braskem, the partnership will also help it achieve its sustainable development targets, especially concerning reaching carbon neutrality. The company expects to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2030 and attain carbon neutrality by 2050.

We remind, Petrobras is not planning to sell its 36% stake in petrochemical firm Braskem, newspaper Valor Economico reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources. Petrobras is one of Braskem's main shareholders alongside conglomerate Novonor, which holds a controlling stake in the firm but has sought to sell it to repay creditors after entering bankruptcy protection. According to Valor Economico, Petrobras CFO Sergio Leite said during a meeting with analysts that the company has no plans to sell off its stake in Braskem.

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Turkey's foreign and energy ministers met the head of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan regional government for talks on Thursday, including on oil exports, which Turkey has blocked from the region since March this year, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Iraqi Kurdish Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, met with Turkey's Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and its Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar in Erbil, the government of the region said in a statement.

"We discussed a range of regional issues, including bilateral Iraq-Turkey relations and also with the Kurdistan Region, as well as the mechanism of exporting the Kurdistan region’s oil," Barzani said in a joint press conference with Fidan following the meeting.

Neither official gave any further information on Iraq's northern oil exports and did not say if a deal had been reached to resume crude flows through Turkey.

Turkey stopped the oil flows on March 25 after losing a long-standing arbitration case brought by Iraq. Bagdad deems exports from the region via Turkey's Ceyhan port as illegal.

Iraq's oil minister has been in Ankara this week where he and his Turkish counterpart failed to reach an agreement to restart the oil exports, although both sides agreed on further talks.

We remind, The CEO of Brazil-based Braskem, Roberto Bischoff, said that the company that is Latin America?s biggest petrochemical organization is seeing atypical scenarios in plastic resin markets that include very large flows of plastic resin exports from the world?s top producer countries into the less developed areas because much of the Northern Hemisphere demand remains challenged. “Atypycal scenarios are common in the industry but this scenario specifically includes a few aspects that really aggravate this,” Bischoff said at the end of the second quarter conference call.

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