Source of picture: omniglobal.com
By John Richardson
A FASCINATING theme to emerge from last week’s Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC) in Mumbai was a growing belief in refinery integration in Asia as a means of being able to compete with the Middle East.
Reliance Industries is planning a giant cracker complex based largely, if not entirely, on off-gases from its Jamnagar refineries. These off-gases will come from fluid catalytic crackers and delayed coking units. This is the first time an investment of this kind has ever been tried.
And, of the course, the well-established Shell Chemicals and ExxonMobil mixed-feed cracker technologies have created a highly profitable production platform in Singapore.
Shell Chemicals officially opened its new Singapore cracker two weeks ago. It can crack very light feeds all the way to the very heavy feeds.
Shell has adapted its hydrocacker, which is part of the company’s existing refinery in Singapore, to supply hydrowax as a cracker feedstock.
ExxonMobil is also due to bring on-stream its second mixed-feed cracker complex in Singapore in 2011-12.
“This current new wave of Middle East projects is not as competitive as the last wave because firstly, capital costs are higher and secondly, they are cracking a higher percentage of propane and butane due to the ethane-gas shortage,” said an industry source
“Propane and butane doesn’t deliver as stellar margins as ethane as the local liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) price formula is linked to the naphtha price in Japan minus a 28% discount.
“I would also argue that the new Saudi propane dehydrogenation-to-polypropylene (PP) complexes face the problems of a capital-intensive technology and a technology that’s difficult to operate.
“Plus conversion of propane to propylene is only 15% per pass and a lot of energy is needed to heat and cool these plants.”
Ethane gas-supply is so limited in Saudi Arabia that there are very few new crackers due on-stream in the Kingdom post-2012
Liquids cracking in Saudi Arabia – or anywhere in the Gulf for that matter- makes little economic sense, according to some consultants.
Do you agree that Asia has an opportunity to work the refinery-petrochemicals integration even more to its advantage in the future?
Or have we fallen victim to a load of company flannel?