InterviewBorouge to build third China polypropylene compounding plant

20 May 2011 16:16  [Source: ICIS news]

GUANGZHOU (ICIS)--Borouge plans to build a third polypropylene (PP) compounding plant in China to meet growing demand from the automotive and home appliance application markets, a senior company executive said on Friday.

The capacity of the proposed new compounding facility, which may be built in the northern part of the country, will be determined by market demand and is likely to be of a similar scale to Borouge’s existing compounding facility in Shanghai, William Yau, CEO of the company's marketing division, told ICIS in an interview.

Borouge’s existing PP compounding plant in Shanghai has a 50,000 tonne/year capacity. Expansion work at the Shanghai plant will begin some time this year to increase its capacity to 80,000 tonnes/year by mid-2012, said Yau.

“Demand is very strong, so we have to speed up,” Yau said on the sidelines of the ChinaPlas exhibition, which ends on Friday.

As well as installing additional extruders, expansion of the Shanghai facility may involve acquiring more land and increasing its warehousing capacity.

The producer is the process of building a PP-compounding plant in Guangdong province in southern China, which is scheduled to start up at the end of 2012, he said.

As part of its efforts to develop markets for its additional capacity in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi , which is scheduled to start up at the end of 2013 or early 2014, the company is also looking at recruiting additional staff in China and setting up a new office in the western part of the country, perhaps in Sichuan province, said Yau.

“In the past two-and-a-half years, a lot of good work had been done. And now looking forward, you can’t stop because Borouge III is coming on stream in 2013 and 2014,” he said.

Borouge will have 4.5m tonnes/year of polyolefins capacity when the Borouge III project comes on stream.

Borouge is a joint venture between the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Austria’s Borealis.

By: Chow Bee Lin
+65 6780 4359

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