M&G to build new PET, PTA plants on US Gulf coast
Mossi & Ghisolfi (M&G) will build a 1mn tonne/year polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plant along the US Gulf coast with an adjoining 1.2mn tonne/year terephthalic acid (PTA) plant to supply feedstock, company officials said.
The M&G Group, which describes itself as the largest producer of PET for packaging applications in the Americas, said it will build a next-generation technology PET plant, co-located and fully integrated with the new PTA plant at the same site.
The plant could be completed by the end of 2013, officials said. The new plants will be located in the southern US, and final candidates for selection have been reduced to sites in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Approximately 250 jobs will be created at the plants, with an additional 700 indirect positions and 3,000 jobs during construction, the company said.
PET is a thermoplastic polymer resin used in the production of packaging for such products as soft drinks, pharmaceuticals, fresh and frozen foods and personal care products. PTA is the primary raw material used in the production of PET.
The new PET single line plant will have a capacity of 1mn tonnes/year (or approximately 2.2 billion lbs/year) and will employ, on a larger scale, the same technology as M&G's single reactor Suape PET plant in Brazil. That plant came on stream in the 2007 first quarter and has since been successfully debottlenecked to 650,000 tonnes/year, the company said.
The PTA unit will have a capacity of 1.2mn tonnes/year (or approximately 2.6 billion lbs/year), and will provide full upstream integration for all of M&G's US PET capacity.
Two technologies, among the very few capable of delivering the required size, are at the final evaluation stage for this PTA plant, which will be the largest in the Americas and among the largest in the world.
A final selection of the location and of the PTA technology is expected to be announced by the end of June, and construction time for both plants is estimated to be 30 months.
"The technological breakthrough of scaling up M&G's proprietary technology to a 1mn tonne single reactor has been available to us since the year 2007 when our investment plans were delayed by the financial crisis," said Marco Ghisolfi, CEO of M&G's polymers business unit.
"As a result of demand growth fully recovering in 2010 and of several plants in North America having closed or been sold over the past few years, the industry supply/demand balance has now been restored, creating room in the market for our new plant,” he continued.
“We continue to believe that North American assets must be competitive in the global environment, so we have decided to follow through with our original plan of leveraging our unique proprietary PET technology and to enhance the plan implementation with the additional benefits of efficient upstream integration now being offered by the latest generation PTA technologies.
"Our PET technology, which allows us to build plants over four times larger than those achievable with commercially available technologies, can today be combined with PTA plants with matching sizes and efficiency. This formidable combination, and the flexibility of its assets, will enable M&G to cost effectively service future industry growth and to have by far the most competitive cost base not only in the Americas but globally."
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