American chemical suppliers take advantage of shale gas fracking

(Canadian Plastics) -- Dow Chemical, Formosa Plastics, and Chevron Phillips Chemical have recently unveiled their expansion plans in North America. It's only been a few short years since the energy industry began tapping deposits in the Marcellus Shale Formation in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but natural gas reserves in the USA have already increased by almost 30 per cent and chemical suppliers are rushing to exploit this new wellspring.

ExxonMobil is also considering building two new polyethylene lines in Mont Belvieu, Texas, as well as a new ethane cracker in Baytown, Texas.

Nova Chemicals has a series of growth projects of its own in development in Ontario’s Chemical Valley, including the possible construction of a new world-scale polyethylene plant in Sarnia-Lambton.

Analysts see the moves by Nova and other domestic resin producers as attempts to develop low-cost feedstocks and create more widespread reshoring of manufacturing to North American suppliers before outside pressures reign them in.
MRC

(Canadian Plastics) -- Tosca Limited, a provider of reusable container pooling and logistics services to the food supply chain, announced that it has acquired the reusable plastic container (RPC) division of Georgia-Pacific LLC.

The acquisition is intended to expand Tosca’s portfolio of products and services. The terms of the deal have not been announced.

Tosca will continue to operate the facilities and will retain Georgia Pacific RPC’s management team and employees.
MRC

(Chemmonitor) -- Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) intends to modernize the domestic petrochemicals sector and, therefore, is set to spend approximately USD 3.3 billion (EUR 2.7billion) on investments in a number of major industry-related projects.

A total of 20 investment projects are to be carried out by MOEA’s Petrochemical Industry High Value Promotion Office. The latter was set up for the sake of maximizing petrochemical products’ economic value and keeping carbon emission to a minimum. Besides, three or even more petrochemical R&D centers’ construction also figures in the office’s plans.
MRC

(BASF) -- BASF has now started offering a portfolio of engineering plastics specially designed for applications that come into contact with drinking water. The products from its Ultramid (PA), Ultradur (PBT) and Ultraform (POM) lines that have been approved for drinking water will now bear the additional trade mark designation Aqua in their names.

In addition to complying with the regulations for contact with drinking water, these plastics are also approved for food contact and are produced according to good manufacturing practices. The special requirements made of plastics that come into contact with drinking water include very low migration values, a high level of taste neutrality and confirmation that long-term contact with the plastic will not cause accelerated algae growth.

BASF SE is the largest diversified chemical company in the world and is headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
The company offers a comprehensive product line and market expertise ranging from commodities to engineering and high-performance materials in thermoplastics, foams and urethanes. BASF's engineering plastics consists of the "4 Ultras" - Ultramid polyamide (PA) nylon-based resins, Ultradur, polybutylene terephthalate (PBT), Ultraform, polyacetal (POM), and Ultrason, polysulfone (PSU) and polyethersulfone (PES).
MRC

(Plastemart) -- In a bid to buy time to arrange working capital and to achieve higher utilisation of capacity in a conducive market environment, cash-strapped Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd (HPL) plans a product swapping agreement with a foreign company as a temporary financing option. If the board approves the terms of swapping arrangement with the bidder in the next meeting, then the company is expected to start the process from the end of September this year. In the swapping arrangement, the bidder will be required to supply naphtha while taking back the processed products.

This arrangement will help the debt-ridden company operate its plant at the fully capacity level as well as finance some of its working capital.

Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd is a modern naphtha based petrochemical complex at Haldia, West Bengal, India. Haldia has played the role of a catalyst in emergence of more than 500 downstream processing industries in West Bengal with a capacity to process more than 3,50,000 TPA of polymers, among which are polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
MRC