МОSCOW (MRC) -- Shell today announced that it has more than doubled the production of high-purity ethylene oxide (HPEO) and ethoxylates at its site on Jurong Island, Singapore, said the producer in its press release.
The company has successfully started up a new purification unit with a capacity of 140,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) of HPEO. A new world-scale production unit today can manufacture 140,000 tpa of ethoxylates. Shell delivers HPEO through an ethylene oxide pipeline grid to ‘over-the-fence’ customers and its own expanded ethoxylation operations on Jurong Island. Feedstock for the new HPEO plant comes from Shell’s ethylene oxide/mono-ethylene glycol plant, which is integrated with the company’s ethylene cracker through to its largest fully-owned refinery on Pulau Bukom.
More than six million man-hours went into both projects, which were completed without disruption to existing operations. Some 400 kilometres of cable, 60 kilometres of piping, and 180 pieces of equipment (including columns, reactors, vessels, heat exchangers) were installed across 35,000 square metres of land (about the size of seven football fields), over two years.
Singapore continues to be an important refining and petrochemicals hub for Shell. The two new petrochemicals production units on Jurong Island further strengthen Shell’s portfolio of world-class manufacturing facilities, and boost its chemicals footprint in Asia. The availability of both ethylene oxide and propylene oxide (PO) at the same location offers an advantageous value proposition for specialty chemical companies, who commonly use both of these intermediates to produce value-added products.
In 2013, Shell increased polyols capacity by more than 100,000 tpa and added new grades to its product offering. In December 2014, it took 100% control of Ellba Eastern, the then styrene monomer and propylene oxide (PO) joint venture with BASF. The move enabled integration with and optimisation of Shell’s existing assets on Jurong Island in a difficult cost environment, and the additional volume of PO allowed the company to make the most of its polyols assets there. Most recently, Shell debottlenecked its Singapore ethylene cracker on Pulau Bukom and increased the capacity of olefins and aromatics by more than 20% to over one million tonnes a year.
Derived from ethylene oxide, HPEO is used in a wide range of household and industrial applications. Its largest outlet is the ethoxylation industry, which processes HPEO and alcohol into alcohol ethoxylates. These are key ingredients for a variety of products, such as detergents and personal care items like shampoo and body wash.
As MRC informed earlier, Shell Chemicals plans to rehabilitate the area surrounding an old Horsehead Corp. site along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. The company has not announced whether it will build an ethane cracker plant in Potter Township but has been undertaking site preparation projects for potential development.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
MRC