Shell Chemicals' growth stays focused on Middle East and China

06 October 2010 15:52  [Source: ICIS news]

LONDON (ICIS)--Shell Chemicals continues to look for production growth in the Middle East and China, a company official said late on Tuesday.

Shell Chemicals remains in negotiations with Qatar Petroleum for a worldscale petrochemicals complex in Qatar, Graham van’t Hoff, global vice president of base chemicals, said on the sidelines of the closing day of the 44^th European Petrochemical Association (EPCA) meeting in Budapest, Hungary.

Joint preliminary studies with PetroChina and Qatar Petroleum are progressing on a worldscale integrated refinery and petrochemical complex in China.

ExxonMobil, Total and Shell are pursuing petrochemical investments in Qatar, but there are concerns about the availability of feedstock for the projects.

Shell has deepened its relationship with Qatar Petroleum, selling shareholding in its twin Singapore joint-venture production companies, the Petrochemical Company of Singapore and The Polyolefin Company (Singapore), to a new joint venture with Qatar Petroleum.

“We still have great interest in working with the Qataris and believe we have the technologies, project management and marketing expertise to add value to such a project,” said a Shell spokesman.

Shell signed a letter of intent in June 2008 for a yuan (CNY) 80bn ($11.9bn) 20m tonne/year refinery and 1.2m tonne/year petrochemical complex at Taizhou, in eastern China's Zhejiang province, with joint-venture partners PetroChina and Qatar Petroleum.

The chemicals product slate for the petrochemicals complex had been decided in principle, Shell said in May.

“Shell is pleased to have an upstream footprint [in Iraq],” said van’t Hoff in Budapest. But he added that currently there is no chemicals element to the energy giant's plans for its investments in the country.

Shell is developing an oil field in Iraq with Malaysia’s Petronas. It has a heads of agreement with Iraq's South Gas Co to deliver large amounts of associated gas from the Governorate of Basra to customers in the country.

Iraq approved the joint venture in June.

($1 = CNY6.69)

Nigel Davis contributed to this article

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Author: Paul Ray

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