A unit of Indonesia's biggest coal miner PT Bumi Resources and U.S. firm Air Products and Chemicals Inc will jointly invest in a methanol facility, said Reuters.
Bumi's Kaltim Prima Coal will build the facility in Bengalon, East Kalimantan, with an annual capacity to produce 1.8 MM tons of methanol, director Dileep Srivastava told Reuters. He added the joint venture company will invest "around USD2-B all in". Indonesia's investment minister, Bahlil Lahadalia, said the two companies aim to break ground in May, while Srivastava said the facility is expected to come online by 2025 or 2026.
Air Products did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In 2020, the company announced it had signed a definitive agreement with Bumi's parent Bakrie Group and PT Ithaca Resources for a USD2-B "world-scale coal-to-methanol production facility".
Bumi said in 2020 it was looking into investing USD1-B in a coal gasification project, to comply with the Indonesian government's ambition of processing its natural resources domestically.
As MRC reported previously, earlier this month, Air Products announced that it had acquired Air Liquide’s industrial gases business in the UAE, including liquid bulk, packaged gases and specialty gases; and Air Liquide’s majority share in MECD, which owns and operates a liquid CO2 production facility in Bahrain.
And in March, 2022, Italian oil and gas company Eni and Air Liquide entered into a collaboration agreement aimed at assessing decarbonization solutions in the Mediterranean region of Europe, focusing on hard-to-abate industrial sectors. The two companies join forces to enable CO2 capture, aggregation, transport and permanent storage.
We remind that Eni is evaluating conversion of its Livorno refinery in northwest Italy into a biorefinery, as part of the Italian company's wider strategy to make its activities more environmentally sustainable. Eni has already converted two of its Italian refineries and is looking to almost double its biorefining capacity to around 2 million mt/year by 2024, and expand this to at least five times by 2050, as part of its pledge to achieve complete carbon neutrality by 2050.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,487,450 tonnes in 2021, up by 13% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market totalled 1,494.280 tonnes, up by 21% year on year. Deliveries of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased, whreas shipments of PP random copolymers decreased significantly.
mrchub.com