LyondellBasell Q4 2022 profits plunge on petchems and polymers weakness

LyondellBasell’s Q4 net profit was down 51% to USD353m year on year on weakness in its petrochemicals and polymers businesses but stronger-than-usual margins for oxyfuels and refining, said the company.

Q4 sales were down 21% at USD10.2bn with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the period 43% lower at USD792m.

“During the fourth quarter, price and margin pressures from new supply, customer destocking and weak demand in petrochemical markets stabilized at levels seen toward the end of the third quarter,” the company said.

Operating rates were reduced to match lower demand and decreased working capital by more than USD700m over the period, it added.

“Lower product prices were partially offset by moderating energy and feedstock costs. Margins for products from LyondellBasell’s oxyfuels and refining businesses remained well above typical fourth quarter levels,” it said.

We remind, LyondellBasell announced it has signed the first two European renewable electricity power purchase agreements (PPAs) and two additional PPAs in the United States. The combined additional contracts represent a total of approximately 560 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy capacity. LyondellBasell has now signed eight PPA agreements and achieved over half of its 2030 target to procure a minimum of 50 percent of global electricity from renewable sources.
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Germany-based Revalyu Resources is investing USD50 million to build its first polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle recycling plant in the United States, said Plasticstoday.

The chemical recycling site will be in Statesboro, GA. “Groundbreaking for the first plant will be June 2023 and commissioning [in] Q3, 2024,” Vivek Tandon, revalyu’s founder, tells PlasticsToday. The 43-acre Statesboro facility will employ about 70 people.

Initially, the Georgia plant is expected to recycle and process more than 12 million PET bottles per day, transforming 225,000 pounds of PET waste into sustainable PET esters and recycled PET (rPET) chips. The company plans to ramp up to a recycling capacity of 450,000 pounds of PET per day at the new plant.

The new US facility will bring revalyu, which also has a PET chemical recycling plant in Nashik, India, closer to its target of recycling more than 2 million pounds of used PET bottles per day by 2026. Revalyu’s glycolysis cehmical recycling process uses 91% less energy and 67% less water than conventional PET recycling.

The company’s chemical recycling technology uses low-temperature glycolysis to depolymerize post-consumer PET bottles into monomers. The monomers are then filtered to remove all impurities before being repolymerized.

A low temperature ensures the integrity of molecular bonds during depolymerization and lowers energy use and cost vs. high-temperature depolymerization. According to revalyu, its recycling process uses 91% less energy and 67% less water than conventional PET recycling.

In addition, revalyu uses mono-ethylene glycol (MEG), which is one of the two components of polyester, as a solvent. Thus, the process includes no chemicals foreign or toxic to polyester.

The result of revalyu’s recycling process is very pure, sustainable PET that can used to directly replace PET produced from petrochemicals. The quality of the rPET is quality equivalent to that of virgin PET.

The rPET chips from revalyu can be used to make new food and nonfood bottles, clothing, fotwear, carpeting, soft furnishings, car seat belts, and in other textile applications.

We remind, after a construction time of nine months and investment of around 7.5 million euros, Austrian plastics manufacturer and recycler Alpla, together with its partners Ecohelp SRL (Romania) and United Polymer Trading AG (Switzerland), have started production at their joint recycling plant in Targu Mures, Romania. The plant, located adjacent to the existing Ecohelp site in Targu Mures, has an annual capacity of around 18,000 tonnes of post-consumer-recycled PET (rPET) per year and aims to supply the southeast European market with food-grade rPET. The project has led to the creation of around 20 new jobs. The joint venture partners will host the official opening ceremony on 4 May 2023.

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NatureWorks, the world’s leading manufacturer of low-carbon polylactic acid (PLA) biopolymers made from renewable resources, hosted a cornerstone laying ceremony to celebrate construction of their new Ingeo PLA manufacturing complex in Thailand, said the company.

The ceremony which took place on February 1st, 2023 commemorated the progress made to date on the new fully integrated biopolymer facility. The day also featured a ceremonial groundbreaking that mirrored the ceremony held in Blair, Nebraska, USA in 2000 when NatureWorks began construction on the world’s first commercial scale PLA manufacturing facility.

The new manufacturing facility located on the Nakhon Sawan Biocomplex (NBC) in Nakhon Sawan Province, Thailand is designed to be fully integrated including production sites for lactic acid, lactide, and polymer. With completion expected in the second half of 2024, the manufacturing site will have an annual capacity of 75,000 tons and will produce the full portfolio of Ingeo biopolymer grades.

“This ceremony is a meaningful milestone for the entire NatureWorks team,” said Rich Altice, president and CEO of NatureWorks. “For the last three decades, we have not only been building a company and manufacturing facilities, but also a whole new industry and market for low-carbon, renewable biomaterials that are revolutionizing the sustainability and safety of packaging and product materials used in our everyday lives.”

We remind, CJ Biomaterials and NatureWorks have signed an agreement to collaborate on developing products based on their respective renewable plastics, PHACT and Ingeo. CJ Biomaterials is a division of South Korea-based CJ CheilJedang and producer of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA). They will work with NatureWorks, an advanced materials company that produces polylactic acid (PLA), in an agreement that calls for the two companies to collaborate on the development of sustainable materials solutions based on CJ Biomaterials’ PHACT Biodegradable Polymers and NatureWorks’ Ingeo biopolymers.

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MAn environmental campaign group has filed what it claimed as a “groundbreaking greenwashing complaint” with the US financial watchdog alleging oil giant Shell is misleading investors over its renewable energy investments, said Upstreamonline.

Global Witness asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate the make-up of the supermajor’s Renewables and Energy Solutions reporting segment, which includes Shell’s various energy transition activities such as investments in wind and solar.

The campaign group says in a letter to the SEC: “Despite its title, a significant portion of Shell’s spending on Renewables and Energy Solutions appears to be directed towards the marketing and trading of ‘natural’ gas – a fossil fuel – and gas-generated power.

“Given that gas is neither renewable nor an energy solution, we ask the Commission, first, to investigate whether the activities included in the RES segment have been properly reported pursuant to relevant accounting standards.”

Global Witness goes on to cite its own calculations that Shell in its most recent annual reporting period “spent just 1.5% total capex on developing renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar”. It alleges that flies in the face of a 12% capex share claimed by Shell in 2021.

In light of that it wants the SEC to also probe “whether including gas in RES without reporting how much spending Shell directs to gas has caused Shell to omit material facts necessary to its investors’ clear understanding of Shell’s purported energy transition.

We remind, Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC announced it has commenced operations of its Pennsylvania Chemical project, Shell Polymers Monaca (SPM). The Pennsylvania facility is the first major polyethylene manufacturing complex in the Northeastern United States and has a designed output of 1.6 MMt annually.

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Kazakhstan, the world's largest landlocked country, increased oil exports that bypassed Russia last year, but was still heavily reliant on supply channels via its neighbor, Reuters calculations based on industry data and sources show, said Reuters.

Kazakhstan has sought ways to decrease its dependence on Russian exporting routes as it has often faced difficulties in selling oil through Russia.

Kazakh oil is not subject to Western sanctions, unlike Russian crude, although the sanctions have created problems for some Kazakh products.

The main, and most profitable, route for oil exports from Kazakhstan remains the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which supplies oil to the global market via a Russian Black Sea terminal.

Supplies via CPC dipped 1% last year to 51.99 MMt, accounting for more than 80% of total oil supplies from Kazakhstan. CPC faced maintenance and other issues, which hindered oil exports in 2022.

According to Reuters calculations based on industry data and sources, Kazakhstan's oil exports via routes other than Russia reached 1.80 MMt (36,000 barrels per day) last year, up by 638,000 tons from 2021.

That included 1.26 MMt delivered to China, 214,000 tons sent via the Georgian port of Batumi, 141,000 tons to the oil refinery in Baku, 109,000 tons to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and 80,000 tons to Uzbekistan.

We remind, Silleno LLP, a joint venture between Russia's SIBUR Holding and Kazakhstan's national oil and gas company KazMunayGas, will soon start Front End Engineering Design for a polyethylene plant in Kazakhstan, Sergei Komyshan, SIBUR's executive director of marketing and sales. "FEED usually takes a year or so," he said. Commenting on SIBUR's plans in Russia in 2023, Komyshan said the company has considered various scenarios for oil production and refining in Russia and was preparing for any options in terms of feedstock supply.

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