Saudi Aramco, ADNOC's India refinery project delayed by two years

MOSCOW (MRC) -- India has delayed the commissioning of a giant refinery that state-owned firms are building in tie-up with Saudi Aramco and Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) by two year to 2025, a senior official at the consortium told Reuters.

The planned 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) coastal refinery in western Maharashtra state slated to commission in 2023, according to the website of Ratnagiri Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd (RRPL), the joint-venture company executing the project.

"The project will be completed in 2024 and commissioning will be in 2025," said RPPL chief executive B. Ashok.

He said the new commissioning schedule has been drawn as the company now has "detailed information on the configuration, availability of the people to build and so on".

According to RPPL website, the USD50 billion refinery and associated petrochemical project would be spread over 15,000 acres of land.

Acquisition of land for the project has been put on hold after a strong opposition from farmers, chief minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis said last month.

Land acquisition has always been a contentious issue in rural India, where the majority of the population depends on farming for their livelihood.

The refinery, which was initially expected to cost USD44 billion, was seen as a game changer - offering India steady fuel supplies and meeting Saudi Arabia and ADNOC’s need to secure regular buyers for its oil.

But thousands of farmers are refusing to surrender land, fearing it could damage a region famed for its Alphonso mangoes, vast cashew plantations and fishing hamlets that boast bountiful catches of seafood.

Ashok said the project would have a very high complexity to churn out superior grade fuels and 18 million tonnes/year of petrochemicals.

State run companies - Indian Oil Corp, Bharat Petroleum Corp and Hindustan Petroleum - own 50 percent stake in RPPL while the remainder is held by Saudi Aramco and ADNOC.

As MRC informed earlier, a USD3.1 billion project to introduce crude processing flexibility, at the ADNOC owned Ruwais oil refinery, was announced in February 2018.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Toray Industries, Inc., announced its decision to enhance production capacity of ABS resin TOYOLAC, manufactured at and distributed by Toray Plastics (Malaysia) Sdn. Berhad (headquarters: Penang, Malaysia), said the company.

The company will add a facility with production capacity of 75,000 tons annually to expand the sales of high performance varieties such as transparent grade, which has the No. 1 global market share, and start its operation in November 2020. The move will increase TPM’s production capacity to 425,000 tons a year and Toray Group’s capacity with the existing facility at Toray’s Chiba Plant to 497,000 tons a year.

Made up of acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene, ABS resin is plastic that is light, strong and elegant with excellent processability, and it is used for an extremely wide range of applications from industrial items to household goods. In 2017, global demand for overall ABS resin was 8.5 million tons, which is expected to grow steadily at 3% a year, as demand increases in China, ASEAN and emerging countries. Of the total, global demand for high performance ABS resin with added properties such as heat resistance and chemical resistance and transparent ABS resin considered to be 2 million tons, and expected to grow at 4% annually or more.

Toray decided to increase the production capacity to ensure to capture the growing demand for the transparent grade TOYOLAC® has the largest share in the global market for its cost competitiveness and stable quality achieved using its proprietary continuous polymerization production process.

Toray also lines up general-purpose grade TOYOLAC®, transparent grade TOYOLAC®and high performance grade TOYOLAC® including antistatic and improved chemical resistance and scratch resistant grades. While Chiba Plant, the mother plant, will shift to primarily produce even higher performance ABS category mix such as medical-use transparent ABS, the production enhancement in Malaysia will accelerate entry into the European, U.S. and Indian markets in addition to its existing main markets of China and ASEAN countries and extension of the products’ applications.

Toray is promoting the expansion and upgrading of the global business as one of the basic strategies of the medium-term management program Project AP-G 2019. Going forward, the company will further strengthen organic cooperation between the Chiba Plant, the Japanese ABS resin production base, and TPM, the Malaysian production base, and vigorously expand the global business.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- BIAXPLEN has joined the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), an independent organisation, signalling its commitment to responsible labour, health and safety, environmental, and business ethics practices as a reliable supplier, said the company.

The membership status was preceded by four-pillar Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audits (SMETA) 6.0 performed at the company’s Balakhna and Novokuybyshevsk sites to verify their compliance with the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Base Code across four key areas – Russian labour laws, health and safety promotion, environmental and sustainability regulations, and fair and ethical business practices as required by legislation.

As with any other Sedex member, BIAXPLEN’s admission will result in fewer audits by customers, as its ethical and social compliance is now assured by Sedex’s public database, allowing customers to build sustainable supply chains, reduce social responsibility and business resilience risks and, therefore, mitigate potential public image and reputational losses.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- BASF SE is advancing its plastics recycling ambitions with a new ChemCycling project, which involves using mixed plastic waste to produce virgin polymers, as per Plasticsnewseurope.

As part of the project, the company has formed a partnership with another German company, Recenso GmbH, which has developed a process to convert mixed plastic fractions into processing oil. Recenso’s CTC process (catalytic tribochemical conversion) is a single-step catalytic liquefaction process using a combination of thermal, catalytic and physical forces for cracking hydrocarbon. CTC, the produced oil, can either be used for energy purposes or as secondary raw material in the chemical/petrochemical industry.

BASF announced 13 Dec that the first batch of CTC oil was fed into the steam cracker at its Ludwigshafen site in October, and was subsequently used to manufacture ethylene and propylene.

“The oil basically replaces fossil-based oils within the process,” explained a BASF spokeswoman to PNE. According to the company official, BASF has now manufactured “a small number of products” with the materials which were produced with the oil.

BASF is currently in the process of developing pilot products – including mozzarella packaging, refrigerator components and insulation panels – and is consulting with 10 customers from various industries. According to BASF the products have “exactly the same” properties as those produced with fossil oils, and can therefore be used in applications with high quality and hygiene standards, such as food packaging.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- With less than a month left to Arabplast 2019, German machinery trade association VDMA has released figures highlighting sales of German plastic & rubber machinery to the Middle East (Gulf Cooperation Council members, as per Plasticsnewseurope.

According to the figures, sales to the region saw a significant decline in the year 2017, as demand in Saudi Arabia dampened. Total sales to the GCC states, mainly Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and UAE, stood at just under EUR20m in the year 2017, 31% below the 2016 figure of EUR63m. The decline was mainly attributable to a 64% drop in sales to Saudi Arabia in 2017, which stood at EUR24m.

Historical figures released by VDMA show that sales to the GCC states have seen a steady decline since 2013 - at over EUR110m that year, total sales were almost double the levels of 2017.

Similarly, total world export of plastic & rubber machinery to the region fell by 26.7% to EUR345m in 2017. The decline was mainly attributable to a 45% year-on-year drop in Saudi Arabia’s imports to EUR168m for the full year.

Despite the declining trend, figures for the first nine months of 2018 indicate a positive trend for the full year. The UAE led the machinery import table with EUR23m worth of transaction for the 9-month period, followed by Oman at EUR19.6m and Saudi Arabia at EUR17.8m.

Arabplast 2019 will be held 5-8 Jan 2019 in Dubai, the UAE.
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