Plants: Sibur to open pilot plant for catalyst/polymer technology; KMG/Sinopec’s planned PTA/PET plant in Kazakhstan enters FEED stage

Russian petrochemical group Sibur is building a facility for piloting base polymer production technologies in Tobolsk at a cost of more than 6 billion rubles, the company said. The facility that will open end of 2024 will run production tests on new catalysts and polymer grades to accelerate development and commercialisation of additional products.

The facility will have a design capacity of up to 300 tonnes/year. It will make it possible to test a broad range of grades of PE and PP to meet the demand for Russia. Currently, production totals 5.3 million tonnes/year with the potential to grow to 6 million tonnes/year by 2028, according to Sibur.

The facility will become one of the projects aimed at self-sufficiency in special components, the guaranteed availability of which will be crucial for the production of up to 15 million tonnes/year of modern synthetic materials by 2030, Sibur said.

"Previously all lab developments were sent for testing immediately to the production facility, but now we will be able to test them at a separate centre, without taking the company's main production facilities out of commercial operation for this. Given that there are plans to annually test at least five catalysts and test the launch of about ten new brands of polymers in Tobolsk, the positive effect for processing sectors can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of additional tonnes of modern synthetic materials," Sibur management board member and managing director for development and innovation Darya Borisova said.

"The hardware configuration of the project provides the possibility to test more than 90% of the range of existing and prospective technologies for production of base polymers, which makes it one of a kind in the world," the company said.

It will also test the company's solutions for production of catalysts, including chrome, titanium-magnesium and metallocene. In future, the facility will also open additional possibilities for licensing these technologies, not just developing them.

The company has now completed installing the core process equipment at the facility, with more than 75% of which was made in Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Perm and Tambov). Construction is scheduled for completion by the end of September, which will be followed by pre-commissioning and comprehensive testing with production of trial products at the end of this year.

The company also plans to open a centre for researching and scaling technologies in Kazan by 2027 and is considering building a plant to produce catalysts in Tatarstan.

In other news, Kazakhstan’s state-owned JSC NC KazMunayGas (KMG) and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) are progressing plans for development of a plant for the production of polyethylene terephthalic acid (PTA) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in Kazakhstan’s western Atyrau region.

To be operated by KMG subsidiary KMG PetroChem, the proposed plant, once in operation, would be equipped to process 400,000 tonnes/year of paraxylene feedstock received from KMG subsidiary ANPZ LLP’s adjacent 5.5 million-tonne/year Atyrau refinery to produce 735,000 tonnes/year of PET.

The companies have conducted a preliminary feasibility study for the PTA-PET project, with KMG and Sinopec now moving forward to front-end engineering and design (FEED) for the proposed plant, KMG said in a statement.

KMG has said earlier that construction of the PTA-PET project would begin in 2025-26 and continue until 2029.

If approved, overall required investment to complete the PTA-PET plant is estimated at more than US$8 billion, KMG said.

Confirmation of the partners’ transition to FEED work on the proposed development follows an agreement signed in 2023 between KMG and Sinopec under which the companies agreed to jointly launch the preliminary feasibility study.

To-date technology providers for the project appointed include Koch Engineered Solutions subsidiary Koch Technology Solutions, which will license its proprietary terephthalic acid technology, with Chemtex Global Corp. and Polymetrix AG to deliver technologies for PET production.

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