EQUATE announces ICP for September 2023

MRC --Global monoethylene glycol (MEG) producer EQUATE has nominated its September 2023 MEG India Contract Price (ICP) at $474/tonne CFR (cost & freight) India Main Ports, the company said.

The September nomination was $2/tonne higher than the August number.

We remind, EQUATE has nominated its August 2023 MEG India Contract Price (ICP) at USD472/tonne CFR (cost & freight) India Main Ports, said the company. The August nomination was USD17/tonne higher than the July number.

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Shell India announced the appointment of Mansi Madan Tripathy as the new Country Chair of Shell India, effective from October 1, 2023. Mansi will succeed Nitin Prasad who has been Country Chair since 2016, said Polymerupdate.

As Country Chair of Shell India, Mansi will oversee Shell Group of companies in India, in addition to her role as Vice President, Shell Lubricants for Asia Pacific. Mansi will relocate from Singapore to New Delhi, her home city, to take up the role. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Technology from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra and has a MBA in Marketing from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research.

Prior to commencement as Country Chair, Mansi was Vice President of Shell Lubricants Asia Pacific, and has held other roles in Shell including Managing Director of Shell Lubricants India and Country Marketing Officer. Mansi joined Shell from Procter & Gamble in 2012, where she held several regional and global Director-level positions.

Shell India extends its sincere thanks and gratitude to Nitin for his leadership through many contributions towards the company’s presence and reputation in India while firmly positioning the company as a trusted partner and contributor to the country’s energy system.

We remind, Shell is considering a sale of its Singapore refining and petrochemical plants as part of a broader strategic review and has hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to explore a potential deal, said several sources close to the matter. The global energy major's new CEO, Wael Sawan, is targeting spending cuts over the next two years to boost profitability while remaining committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

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Sumitomo Chemical has achieved groundbreaking success in pioneering production technology for ultra-fin -а-alumina, set to start mass production from September this year with its recently established manufacturing capabilities at its Ehime Works, said Polymerupdate.

Collaborating with its customers, the Company will create new markets in the ICT, energy-saving and life science fields through technological innovations in inorganic materials. In FY2025 the company seeks to achieve a 30% increase in sales revenue in its ultrahigh purity alumina business compared to FY2023.

Alumina materials made by calcining aluminum hydroxide at high temperatures, purity levels of 99.99% or more are called ultrahigh purity alumina. The new products to be mass-produced are the NXA series products, which are ultra-fine grade of а-alumina products mainly used in industrial products. They are characterized by homogeneous ultra-fine particles with a particle size of 150 nm (0.15 m) or less. In comparison to its products with relatively large particle sizes, this is approximately one two-hundredth of the size of the Company’s products having relatively large particle sizes.

We remind, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation has announced a USD10m investment to advance the recovery and recycling of rigid and flexible PE and PP. The Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund has received a USD10m investment from Japanese multinational banking and financial services institution Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC).

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Bryson Recycling, a United Kingdom-based social enterprise that operates a material recovery facility (MRF), has ordered four additional robotic sorters made by London-based Recycleye Robotics. The Bryson MRF in Mallusk, Northern Ireland, installed an initial Recycleye robot in 2021, said Recyclingtoday.

“This four-fold investment increase marks the first announced robot re-purchase in the U.K. and Ireland,” according to Recycleye. The equipment firm says Bryson decided to purchase additional robots “to build on the successful operation of an existing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Recycleye Robotics solution on its fiber line.”

The additional units, says Recycleye, are expected to improve material quality, maximize recycling, reduce residual waste and reduce costs. “We have decided to purchase four further robots from Recycleye following the great results from the first one – almost 8,500 run hours, with around 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) of materials picked per week, and with an availability greater than 98 percent,” says Jaroslaw Stanislawek, Bryson’s engineering manager. “We feel confident this new installation will further improve the consistency in our material quality.”

“Investments such as this enable us to stay on top of the benefits of new technology,” remarks Katy Fulton, a director at Bryson Recycling. “We are a significant local employer, and that means running a profitable business that is open to change and innovation.”

Recycleye CEO Victor Dewulf comments, “We are delighted that Bryson Recycling has chosen to continue working with us to build on their initial investment in our AI-powered [recycling] robots. This is a strong statement of confidence in the value Recycleye robots bring to [materials] sorting and to the economics of materials recovery, and we are proud to be able to support Bryson.”

The four new robots will be retrofitted in the main sorting cabin at the company’s MRF, which is on the outskirts of Belfast and employs more than 100 people. Two of the four robots will be installed over a fiber line with the objective of picking non-paper items such as plastics, cans and cardboard to reduce contamination.

The remaining two robots will operate on a residual line, where they will target the removal of recyclable materials with the aim of diverting higher volumes into recycling end markets rather than to a waste-to-energy outlet.

The robots will be programmed to perform the physical tasks of identifying, picking and placing materials and will “operate alongside, but separate, to human operatives, who continue to work in the company’s facilities,” states Recycleye.

Recycleye refers to an “AI computer vision system” as being able to detect “all individual items” in the materials stream. Bryson Recycling collects and processes materials from more than 50 percent of homes in Northern Ireland and employs more than 350 people at 12 sites in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Wales.

We remind, Republic Services, the second biggest waste disposal company in the U.S. after Waste Management Corp., said that it teamed up with polymer recycler and distributor Ravago to create Blue Polymers, LLC, a company “that will develop a network of facilities designed to produce recycled products” to supply manufacturers that buy resin.

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Marathon Petroleum Corp (MPC.N) said on Friday night a fire at its 596,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Garyville, Louisiana refinery was nearly extinguished, but fire suppression work was continuing to prevent flareups, said Reuters.

The company will begin evaluating restarting units closest to the fire that were shut earlier in the day "out of an abundance of caution," said Marathon spokesperson Jamal Kheiry. Two giant naphtha storage tanks on the south side of the refinery near the Mississippi River erupted in flames on Friday morning following a chemical leak, sending a huge plume of black smoke over the largely rural area 38 miles (67 km) west of New Orleans on Friday morning.

Late on Friday afternoon, St. John the Baptist Parish President Jaclyn Hotard lifted a mandatory evacuation for residents living within two miles of the refinery, according to a spokesperson for the parish. The blaze destroyed both storage tanks, melting the walls of one to the ground and almost as much for the other, according to video broadcast from local media outlets.

One firefighter was examined for heat stress. No other injuries were reported, Kheiry said. Three large semi trucks hauled fire suppression foam and firefighting equipment on Friday from Marathon's Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, Texas to Garyville, said people familiar with operations at Galveston Bay.

Garyville, like much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, is under an excessive heat warning, with the temperature reaching 97 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) on Friday afternoon. Marathon's Garyville refinery is the third-largest in the United States by capacity.

Kheiry said Marathon would investigate the fire's cause. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an organization critical of the oil and gas industry's safety and environmental record, faulted lax oversight by the state of Louisiana for the fire.

"The petrochemical industry is here in Louisiana for one reason only: to make as much money as possible," said Anne Rolfes, executive director of the organization. "As long as the state of Louisiana continues to look away from fires and mushroom clouds, these accidents will continue." Greg Langley, press secretary for the Louisiana Department of Environment Quality, declined to comment on the Bucket Brigade statement.

We remind, Marathon Petroleum’s former refinery in Martinez, California, has been repurposed to produce renewable diesel through the company’s joint venture with Neste. The Martinez Renewable Fuels Facility is currently operating with a capacity of 260 MMgal/yr. Additional production capacity is expected to be online by the end of 2023, bringing the total capacity to approximately 730 MMgal/yr of renewable fuels.

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