MOSCOW (MRC) -- South Korea's petrochemical maker Hanwha Total plans to shut down its LPG-fed steam cracker in Daesan from March for 45 days to expand its ethylene production capacity by about half to 450,000 mt/year from 300,000 mt/year currently, reported S&P Global with reference to a company source's statement.
"In March, we will start the maintenance of our LPG cracker for 45 days. During that period, we also expand our cracker capacity by 50% from 300,000 mt/year of ethylene to 450,000 mt/year," said the company source, without giving the exact date in March for the shutdown to begin.
Once the expansion works are completed, the propylene capacity of LPG-fed steam cracker would be also raised to 130,000 tons/year from the current 80,000 tonnes of propylene.
Hanwha also owns another cracker at the same site, processing naphtha with the capacity of 1.1 million tons/year of ethylene and 860,000 tons of propylene.
Hanwha Total's naphtha-fed steam cracker is currently operating at 100% capacity, the company source said. This is similar to most naphtha-fed steam crackers in Asia.
As MRC informed earlier, Hanwha Total Petrochemical restarted its naphtha-fed Deasan cracker on 10 June, 2019, following a maintenance and debottlenecking exercise. The cracker was shut for maintenance and expansion in end-March, 2019. Following the expansion, the ethylene capacity has been increased by 310,000 MT and propylene capacity by 120,000 MT.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
MRC