PetroChina Sichuan awards China chemical project

Aug. 12, 2008
PetroChina Sichuan has selected the Unipol polypropylene process technology from Dow for its new 450,000 tpy polypropylene facility at Chengdu, capital city of China's Sichuan province.

By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Aug. 12 -- PetroChina Sichuan Petrochemical Co. Ltd. has selected the Unipol polypropylene (PP) process technology from Dow Technology Licensing for its new 450,000 tonnes/year PP facility at Chengdu, capital city of Southwest China's Sichuan province.

Aker Process BV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aker Solutions ASA, Oslo, will carry out process design and technical advisory services.

When completed and on stream in 2010, the Petrochina Sichuan facility will be one of the largest single-train PP facilities in China, a part of PetroChina Sichuan's 800,000-tpy ethylene complex at Chengdu, the largest in Southwest China.

With this facility and others under construction at Fushun in Liaoning province and at QinZhou in GuangXi province, PetroChina will have nearly 1 million tpy of PP capacity available using the Unipol PP technology. Aker Solutions was awarded the contracts for basic engineering design and technical advisory services for each of the three plants.

The PetroChina Sichuan license agreement includes production capability for a broad range of PP resins, including homopolymers, random copolymers, and impact copolymers for various grades of plastics, Dow said.

When this plant and others currently in the execution stage enter service, Unipol PP technology will be used to produce nearly 11 million tpy of PP, which will represent more than 16% of total global capacity.