Formosa’s new US PE plant to produce 525,000 tonnes/year – permit

Clarification: Please read the fifth item in the table as LDPE instead of LLDPE.

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Formosa Plastics’s latest proposed polyethylene (PE) plant at its Point Comfort complex in Texas will have a capacity to produce 525,000 tonnes/year, according to figures from an air permit obtained on Wednesday.

The PE plant would be the second new one that Formosa plans to build at Point Comfort.

The company has already started construction on a low-density polyethylene (LDPE) plant at Point Comfort, as well as an ethane cracker and a propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit.

Construction on the second PE plant should start in the fourth quarter of 2015, and it should start operations in December 2017, the permit application said.

Formosa did not disclose the capacity of the plant or any details about the type of PE it will produce.

However, the air-permit application listed the plant’s PE capacity at 132,000 lb/hour, or 525,000 tonnes/year.

The plant will use both 1-butene and 1-hexene, allowing the production of co-polymer PE.

The plant will use a low-pressure, gas-phase polymerisation process, the permit said. Both dry, sand-like and slurry-type catalysts can be used.

The plant will also use an unnamed metal alkyl, which will serve as a co-catalyst for making certain grades of PE.

Formosa also plans to build a monoethylene glycol (MEG) plant at Point Comfort. That plant’s capacity would be 251,700 lb/hour or 1m tonnes/year, according to the air-permit application.

Diethylene glycol (DEG) capacity will be 20,800 lb/hour, triethylene glycol (TEG) will be 1,100 lb/hour and polyethylene glycol (PEG) will be 700 lb/hour.

Out of the other Point Comfort projects under construction,  the ethane cracker will have an ethylene capacity of 1.75m tons/year (1.59m tonnes/year), and the PDH plant will have a propylene capacity of 725,000 tons/year, according to a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

According to the EPA permit, the LDPE unit will have a capacity of 625,500 tons/year and be able to produce resin at different grades, including products that use vinyl acetate as a co-monomer.

Currently, the ethylene capacity at Point Comfort is 1.50m tonnes/year, and MEG capacity is 300,000 tonnes/year, according to ICIS.

The plant can produce 650,000 tonnes/year of high density polyethylene (HDPE) and 365,000 tonnes/year of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE).

The following lists the various plants at Point Comfort.