Saudi Aramco has agreed to acquire a 17% stake in refining company Hyundai Oilbank (Seoul, South Korea) for about $1.25 billion. Aramco Overseas Co., a Saudi Aramco subsidiary, will purchase the stake from Hyundai Heavy Industries, the parent of Hyundai Oilbank. Hyundai Heavy Industries announced the deal in January but said that Aramco would buy 19.9% of Hyundai Oilbank.
Aramco says the deal supports the company’s crude-oil placement strategy by providing an additional outlet for Arabian oil at Hyundai Oilbank’s refinery. It is also the latest in a series of downstream and chemical investments by Aramco. “Saudi Aramco continues to strengthen its position in the downstream sector,” says Abdulaziz al-Judaimi, senior vice president/downstream at Aramco. “This acquisition demonstrates our investment in the highly complex refining sector in Asia.”
Hyundai Oilbank operates an integrated production complex at Daesan, South Korea, based on a 650,000 b/d refinery. The company makes petrochemical products at the refinery, including aromatics and propylene. Hyundai Cosmo, a joint venture with Cosmo Oil (Tokyo, Japan), has a combined 1.42 million metric tons/year of benzene, toluene, and xylenes capacity at the Daesan refinery, Hyundai Oilbank says.
Hyundai Oilbank and Hyundai Chemical, a Lotte Chemical subsidiary, are planning a world-scale petrochemical complex at Daesan that will use heavy fuel oil as feedstock to produce olefins and other downstream products. Start-up is slated for 2021.
Aramco owns a majority stake of 63.4% in another South Korean refiner, S-Oil.
By Ian Young
Source: Chemical Week
Eastman is investing up to US$1 billion in building what it says is the world’s largest molecular plastics recycling facility in France. The new facility would use Eastman’s polyester renewal technology to recycle up to 160,000 metric tons of hard-to-recycle plastic waste annually – enough plastic waste to fill Stade de France national football stadium 2.5 times.
Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution has opened the books to investors to raise up to $10.8 billion in the country’s largest initial public offering (IPO), according to a term sheet seen by Reuters. The shares will be sold in a price range of 257,000 won to 300,000 won ($216.19-$252.36) apiece to raise between $9.2 billion and $10.8 billion, the term sheet showed.
The SHYNE (Spanish Hydrogen Network) project is the largest multisectoral consortium in Spain, created to promote the decarbonization of the economy through renewable hydrogen. SHYNE will have a total investment of €3.23 billion euros that will serve to develop more competitive technologies and evolve both the Spanish industry and its infrastructure towards decarbonization, generating more than 13,000 jobs.
