By John Richardson THE BALTIC DRY INDEX, one of the excellent barometers of overall economic activity, was late last week at its lowest level since June on a slowing Chinese economy, easing congestion at Chinese ports and a fall in Chinese coal imports (more on this in a moment). “The index was around 1,000 a […]
Asian Chemical Connections
China’s Polypropylene Market: The Right Questions You Simply Must Ask
By John Richardson On the surface, the above chart represents very good news for exporters of polypropylene (PP) to China. As you can see, our base case sees import volumes creeping up from around 3.9m tonnes in 2018 to 4.2m tonnes in 2025. But this chart should be merely a starting point for a much […]
China Pollution: The Years Of Living Differently
By John Richardson “THE mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” is a well-known phrase in China, which has been applied to many areas of legal enforcement. “The refinery in, say, Shanxi province might have installed a de-sulphurisation unit, or at least something that looked like such a unit,” an “old China hand”, […]
China To Grow at 3 Percent
By John Richardson THE possibility that China’s economy may not expand as rapidly in the future as in the past is never discussed in public by resources-company CEOs, said an Australian-based stockbroker. His comments ring true for petrochemicals, also. The blog is struggling to find a senior executive willing to discuss this possibility on the […]
China coal-based MEG moves ahead
By Malini Hariharan China’s second coal-based monoethylene glycol (MEG) plant is due to start in the second half of 2012, reports ICIS news. The plant, located in Hebi, Henan province, will have a capacity of 250,000 tonnes/year and will be operated by Wuhan Engineering, Haiso Technology, and Hebi Baoma Group. The three companies successfully tested […]
Coal chemicals wave sweeps China
By Malini Hariharan A few months back the blog had expressed sceptism on a Chinese company’s plans for a methanol-to-olefins (MTO) project based on imported methanol. The economics of such projects appear doubtful but many Chinese companies are looking to go down the same road. In its annual review on China’s coal chemical industry, Consultancy […]
China’s coal chemical projects take shape
By Malini Hariharan The first of China’s major coal-based chemical projects has finally started trial operations. ICIS news reports that methanol has been fed at Shenhua Baotou’s 600,000 tonnes/year methanol-to-olefins (MTO) plant at Baotou, in inner Mongolia. The unit can produce 300,000 tonnes/year each of ethylene and propylene. But the downstream polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene […]
Life gets more complicated for methanol
In the good or maybe the bad old days depending on your standpoint, methanol was a fairly straightforward product. You had chemicals demand and that was more or less it. But as the extended analysis below explains, chemical producers who use methanol as feedstock have to factor in direct blending of gasoline into methanol, DME, […]
Are coal-to-chemicals projects in China a load of nonsense?
Maybe, if the mystery blogger at the excellent http://www.theoildrum.com/ site knows what he is talking about. I’ve pasted in his arguments below. You need to register at this site, which takes only a few minutes, if you want to get into the wider debate about how energy issues will have a critical bearing on all […]
Jump to page: