By Malini Hariharan If sourcing PTA has been challenging this year, the bad news is that the situation is unlikely to improve for the next couple of years. Rapid polyester capacity expansion, especially in China and India, is already outpacing growth in PTA capacities and the situation is set to worsen. PTA producers, on the […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Reliance Reveals Major Investment Plans
By Malini Hariharan India’s Reliance Industries is evaluating investments in a number of chemicals including olefins and derivatives, acetyls, elastomers and fibre intermediates to increase its petrochemicals production from crude, a senior company executive has told the blog. “We would like to maximise petrochemical production from our refineries, swing product slate from fuel […]
Facts, Fiction And Price-Rise Sustainability
Source of picture: tycoonreport.com By John Richardson This is a very dangerous time for petrochemicals producers as they attempt to separate real, sustainable demand from feedstock-cost related price rises and speculation. A bubble – as we discussed yesterday – seems to have formed in purified terephthalic (PTA) and, according to ICIS news, in […]
China fuels another price bubble
By Malini Hariharan Speculative fever has struck the Chinese purified terephthalic acid (PTA) market with domestic prices soaring by 26% in just one week. PTA futures trading on the Zhejiang Commodity Exchange (ZCE) was suspended for the whole day Tuesday, after values soared by more than 10% in just three days, writes my colleague Becky […]
Reliance’s polyester play
By Malini Hariharan With Indian polyester demand growing steadily at 10%/year Reliance Industries has renewed its focus on expansions along the chain. Projects that were put on hold after the 2008 economic crisis have been revived and deadlines set. The company’s plans include two new worldscale purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plants and investments in paraxylene […]
Capitalising on the cotton crisis
By Malini Hariharan Cotton prices have hit a 140-year high on the ICE futures in the US creating room for further price hikes across the polyester chain. Prices of paraxylene (PX), purified terephthalic acid (PTA), monoethylene glycol (MEG) and polyester fibre and yarn have escalated sharply in the last few months as a supply […]
Petchem markets on a bull run
By Malini Hariharan The Chinese are back from their holidays and they are buying. This coupled with supply constraints and firm crude prices is fuelling a surge in petrochemical prices. Paraxylene (PX) prices hit a 2-year high this week on speculative activity and production problems at a couple of Chinese plants, reports ICIS news. Spot […]
Reliance eyes 2014 start for Jamnagar cracker
By Malini Hariharan Reliance Industries is moving ahead with its Jamnagar cracker project and is looking at completing it in 2014, reports ICIS news. Preliminary activity on the project, which was put on hold after the 2008 economic crisis, has resumed. Discussions are on for technology selection and a firm start up date will be […]
Shell would like to build two MEG plants in Qatar
By John Richardson An ethane shortage is slowing Shell Chemicals’ ambitions for building at least one cracker complex in Qatar, Ben van Beurden, executive vice-president of the company said last week. “Ideally, we’d like to build two crackers and two OMEGA process plants on the scale of this one here in Singapore, but at […]
Has Shell Made The Right Choices on MEG?
Looking pretty – the new Shell plant at night: Sourceof picture: Shell Chemicals By John Richardson WHEN Shell Chemicals officially opened its OMEGA process 750,000 tonne/year monoethylene glycol (MEG) plant in Singapore today, it mentioned how its global production share of the fibre intermediate was only 7%. One might wonder how effective this is […]
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