Sinopec, SABIC may start new MTBE plant in March - sources

05 February 2010 08:10  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Petrochemical giants Sinopec and Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC) are likely to start operating their new 120,000 tonne/year methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) plant at Tianjin in northern China in March, industry sources said on Friday.

The plant is located in northern Tianjin, the site of the companies’ new 1m tonne/year joint venture cracker.

“The start date for the new MTBE plant is expected in March,” said a source in Mandarin, who declined to be named.

Sinopec and SABIC restarted their 1m tonne/year cracker in northern Tianjin on Friday following a delay of two days. The cracker was initially scheduled to resume operations on 2 February after an outage on 23 January, a few days after it started up on 16 January.

With additional reporting by Judith Wang

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