Fire breaks out at plastic waste site in Osijek, Croatia

A massive fire broke out at a plastic waste site in the Croatian city of Osijek, Reuters said.

The city’s Civil Protection Directorate said that the fire erupted in the early hours of Wednesday, prompting firefighters to extract 1,500 liters of sodium lye and 1,000 liters of hydrochloride from the site.

A total of 74 firefighters and 33 fire engines are involved in the fire extinguishing operation and citizens have been warned against the harmful effects of the gases produced by the burning plastic.

Osijek Mayor Ivan Radic told the local media that the fire continues to rage and that they expect the extinguishing efforts to continue until the evening hours.

Due to the strong wind, the smoke reached the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two firefighters were slightly injured by the fire.

We remind, at least 37 people, including two pregnant women, were burned to death after a blast at an illegal oil refinery in southern Nigeria. Illegal refining is common in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria as impoverished locals tap pipelines to make fuel to sell for a profit. The practice, which can be as basic as boiling crude oil in drums to extract fuel, is often deadly.

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Invista will begin shutting down it's production facility in Orange right away, closing it and eliminating more than 200 jobs by the end of 2024, said Plasticsnews.

Shutdown of the company's adiponitrile, or ADN, production unit in Orange will begin right away according to a news release from the company. The company made the announcement on Thursday according to a news release on its website.

Invista says it expects to stop production of hexamethylene diamine, or HMD, in mid-2024. The cause for the shutdown is being blamed on low demand and higher supply.

"Unfortunately, lower than anticipated growth and an increase in global supply led to this difficult decision," Francis Murphy, INVISTA president and CEO, was quoted as saying in the release.

By the end of 2024 about 240 of the facility's current 300 jobs will be eliminate the company said. All employees who are losing a job will be eligible for severance benefits. "We appreciate the diligent and innovative work of employees at the Orange site over the years," Murphy said in the news release. The company says that it is committed to treating all employees with dignity and respect as the facility is shut down.

We remind, Invista (Wichita, Kan.) announced that INVISTA Nylon Chemicals (China) Co. held the inauguration ceremony for its new adiponitrile (ADN) plant at the Shanghai Chemical Industry Park (SCIP). Being a critical part of INVISTA’s integrated nylon 6,6 value chain, the plant, which is a more than 7 billion RMB (over 1 billion USD) investment, has a capacity of 400,000-ton/year and is the largest capital project in in the company’s history.

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Turkish-Belgian chemical recycling company Synpet Technologies has announced plans to construct its first commercial recycling plant in Antwerp, said Sustainableplastics.

Synpet, with the backing of the Kolmar Group - that acquired a stake in the company in a first capital round - will be investing some €100m in the project. The investment also gives Kolmar the exclusive right to the output of the new plant, under a supply agreement signed in October 2022.

Kolmar CEO Ruth Sandelowsky commented at that time that the investment supported Kolmar’s strategic ambition is to invest in renewable, bio and low carbon technologies to gain access to the associated products and markets, and to serve the chemical markets continuing and evolving needs. “This presents an opportunity to Kolmar to create service provision with access to pyrolysis oil, supply chain optionality, and optionality with cracker operators,” she said.

Synpet originally intended to build the facility in Genk (Belgium), but has now opted for Antwerp - ‘one of Europe's largest and most intensive petrochemical clusters' - instead. The companies have said they are aiming for start-up of the new plant in 2025. The project is expected to create around 70 jobs in Antwerp.

This first plant will have an initial capacity to process 180,000 tonnes of mixed plastic waste per year but the partners are striving for more, saying they aim reach a global processing capacity of 1,000,000 tonnes of plastic waste by 2030.

Founded in 2024, Synpet Technologies has developed proprietary technology that decomposes plastics and other various waste types to form pure hydrocarbons using water as the reagent, at a specific pressure and temperature in a wet environment. Unlike other processes such as pyrolysis or gasification, Synpet Technologies’ TCP (Thermal Conversion Process) process is extremely efficient and has the great competitive advantage of not requiring any sorting, drying or pre-treatment of waste upstream. All waste, whatever its quality, is eligible. As long as it contains carbon, the process is capable of processing it. At the end of the process, four products are obtained: renewable oil (naphtha) which can replace petroleum naphtha to produce new plastics and can create a true circular economy; natural gas with a high calorific value that can be used for thermal and electrical energy; biochar that can be used as fertiliser in agriculture or as a raw material, for example in cement kilns to replace coal and reduce general CO2 emissions; and a liquid organic fertiliser if the technology is applied to materials containing nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., which are present in household waste and municipal sewage sludge.

A 15-tonne demo production unit has been operating since 2016 near Istanbul in Turkey. It has been tested and validated by the German certification office TUV-SUD and various petrochemical companies.

We remind, Synpet Technologies wants to build a plastic waste recycling plant in Genk, it announced in a press release. The unit is expected to be operational in 2024 and employ around 70 people. Synpet has been working on its plastic waste recycling process since 2014. All waste containing carbon is targeted, including dirty non-recyclable plastics.

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Shell said its third-quarter profit would be pressured by a near halving of oil refining margins, crumbling chemical margins and weaker natural gas trading, said Reuters.

The British energy giant reported two consecutive quarters of record profit in the first half of the year amid soaring oil and gas prices, and stellar earnings from its trading operations, the world's biggest. read more.

Its shares were down 4.3% by 0847 GMT, compared with a 1% decline for the broader European energy sector.

But in the third quarter, indicative refining margins dropped to $15 a barrel compared with $28 a barrel in the previous three months, Shell said in an update ahead of its results on Oct. 27, amid growing concerns over a global economic slowdown.

And indicative margins for chemicals dropped to negative $27 per tonne versus a positive $86 in the second quarter after global demand for plastics slumped.

We remind, Shell Petroleum Company Limited, through its 100% owned subsidiary Impello Limited (“Shell”), has agreed to sell its home energy businesses, Shell Energy Retail Limited (SERL) in the UK and Shell Energy Retail GmbH (SERG) in Germany, to Octopus Energy Group.

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Operations of the third refinery at Al-Zour petroleum complex will begin within a few weeks, "specifically before the end of October," Kuwaiti news agency (KUNA) said on Tuesday citing Kuwait Integrated Petroleum Industries Company (KIPIC)'s spokesman, as per Reuters.

"The necessary tests are currently being conducted to ensure the safety of the refinery," KIPIC's spokesman Abdullah Al-Ajmi said.

The refinery has a refining capacity of 615,000 barrels of crude oil per day, it added.

We remind, Private Russian oil producer Lukoil will lend Azeri state oil firm Socar $1.5 B as part of a broader deal that will allow Socar's 200,000-barrel-per-day Turkish STAR refinery to process Russian crude again. The deal will give Lukoil another customer in close proximity to Russian ports after most European refiners stopped importing its crude to comply with European Union sanctions imposed after Moscow launched what it calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine in 2022.

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