Ineos Phenol, an Ineos subsidiary, today confirmed that it would build a world-scale cumene plant at the company’s Marl, Germany, site to be completed in 2021. Ineos first announced the project two years ago and said it hoped to bring the plant on-line in 2020. The facility will be designed to produce 750,000 metric tons/year and be based on the Badger cumene technology. Badger Licensing is a joint venture between TechnipFMC and ExxonMobil. Ineos already operates a cumene facility at Marl.
The cumene facility will use existing pipeline connections among Ineos’s phenol and acetone production site at Gladbeck, Germany; the Evonik Chemiepark site at Marl; and the BP refinery and steam cracker complex at Gelsenkirchen, Germany. Ineos says the plant’s location will optimize its efficiency by integrating raw materials from the refinery and cracker complex. The site also benefits from the Marl harbor waterway connection.
The cumene plant will secure raw material supplies to the Ineos phenol and acetone plants at Antwerp, Belgium; and Gladbeck. Ineos is the world’s largest producer of phenol and acetone, and the largest consumer of cumene, an essential raw material. Ineos has a combined capacity for phenol of 1.9 million metric tons/year (MMt/y), for acetone of 1.2 MMt/y, and for cumene of 1.2 MMt/y across plants at Antwerp, Gladbeck, and Marl, as well as Mobile, Alabama; and Pasadena, Texas. Ineos has capacity for 900,000 metric tons/year of cumene at Pasadena and 260,000 metric tons/year of cumene at Marl.
Ineos’s Gladbeck plant is the company’s largest single-train phenol manufacturing complex with capacity for more than 650,000 metric tons/year of phenol and 400,000 metric tons/year of acetone. It receives cumene from Ineos’s existing plant at Marl, which is operated by the Ineos styrenics subsidiary on behalf of Ineos Phenol. Benzene and propylene feedstocks for the Marl cumene plant are provided by Ineos. Cumene is shipped to Gladbeck via a 17-kilometer pipeline. The plant at Antwerp is designed to produce 680,000 metric tons/year of phenol.
By Natasha Alperowicz
Source: Chemical Week
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