By John Richardson
THE article of faith publicly expressed at last week’s Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC) in Fukuoka, Japan, was that the current problems with demand in China and India were only temporary.
Discussions the blog held were packed with the conventional wisdom that not enough capacity would be built over the next few years. For example, one estimatewe heard was that there was the need for 35 crackers to be built to meet global ethylene equivalent demand growth over the next decade; so far only 24 had been announced.
But as we mentioned last week, Singapore-based PNB Parabis chemicals analyst Kunal Agrawal estimates that 11m tonne/year of yet-to-be-disclosed ethylene capacity could be built by 2015, based on available refinery feedstock. This could be on addition to the 16-17m tonne/year of capacity already announced fed by these same refineries.
One has to also worry about Sinopec’s propensity to add capacity for self-sufficiency reasons, regardless of the economics.
A lot of talk at the conference was about China’s potential to make use of coal for this purpose.
But the blog feels that because the environmental and economic problems of the coal-to-mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) and methanol-to-olefins (MTO) processes are so huge, the advent of a large amount of coal-based capacity will not happen during the next wave of overbuilding. If Sinopec announces firm new projects for start-up during the upcoming cycle, they will be based on refining.
We will discuss the environmental issue surrounding coal-to-chemicakls in more detail later on, but here is a rather worrying statistic: According to the consultancy Tecnon Orbichem it takes seven tonnes of coal and 2.5 tonnes of methanol to produce one tonne of olefins. When the blog asked a senior chemicals industry executive where all this carbon disappeared to, he pointed his finger upwards.
If we had $50 every time we heard mention of shale gas during the conference the blog would be very rich. Sadly we are not, which is why we have written this post.
Sufficient ethane would be available for an additional 8m tonne/year of ethylene capacity in the US over the next 20 years, according to IHS director Russell Heinen in a paper he gave during the event.
In an interview with the blog, two senior executives of Shell Chemicals said that their company was studying North American expansions based on low-cost ethane.
“We have 700,000 acres of shale gas assets in the US and Canada and so we feel we are in a good position,” said Iain Lo, Shell’s vice president, business development and ventures.
The focus would initially be on additions to existing plants in Louisiana and Texas, but Sven Royall, Shell’s vice president for global intermediates, said that “everything was on the table” – when asked about the possibility of a greenfield cracker.
Mention of Canada was interesting. With all the focus on US shale gas the blog had missed the possibility that shale assets in Alberta might also be exploited for petrochemicals.
Shell’s comments come after a raft of announcements over the last few months of studies into new crackers and debottleneckings of existing facilities by other US majors, such as Dow Chemical, ChevronPhillips Chemicals and LyondellBasell.
One of the ethylene derivatives anticipated to be in tight supply over the next few years is MEG, given feedstock shortages in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia in particular has met most of the demand growth over the six or so years. Now, though, it seems unlikely that it would be allowed to add more capacity in the Kingdom for strategic reasons, even if it could get its hands on more gas allocations.
Returning to coal-to-chemicals in China, there has therefore been a lot of excitement over the syngas (made from coal) to oxalic acid and then on to MEG process, bypassing the need for ethylene.
It takes 4-5 tonnes of coal to make one tonne of MEG via this route, said an industry observer. While not as bad as MTO this is still pretty grim.
So the conventional ethylene route seems the likely means of meeting perceived future demand over the next 5-6 years.
Shell, in the same interview with the blog, disclosed plans to add two OMEGA process MEG plants in Qatar (each 750,000 tonne/year) by 2016-2017.
The industry observer also told us: “It makes sense to build MEG capacity in the US to serve the local purified terephthalic acid (PET) and textiles industries, which are mainly based in South and North Carolina.
“The US is a significant net importer of MEG and so this new capacity would be backing-out exports.
“As far as ethane supply goes, it is not rocket science to reverse the flow of pipelines that currently go from the south to the north. Ethane could be made to flow from the Marcellus shale-gas fields to new crackers that may be built in Texas and Louisiana. These facilities would then supply the MEG to the Carolinas.”
This entire post has talked about capacity. We have not discussed why the industry believes in the doctrine of a continued global economic boom.
The reason for this is that we are journalists and so always endeavour to faithfully report what people tell us.
What APIC told us was that the delegates we spoke to, and listened to during presentations, were either unaware – or didn’t want to publicly discuss – profound changes in the global economy.
These are detailed in our new e-book – ‘Boom, Gloom and the New Normal: how Western BabyBoomers are changing global chemical demand patterns, again.’
Changes in demographics in the West – and a major shift in both demographics and government policy in China – need to at the very least be discussed openly by the industry.
There may be good reasons to discount what we argue in our book, but we have yet to hear them.