Coal-to-chemicals breakthrough in China

Over 360 million lbs of light olefins have been produced at a plant in Nanjing, China, using breakthrough technology that converts coal to chemicals used in the making of plastic.

UOP LLC, a company owned by Honeywell Corp., has announced that its licensee, China’s Wison Clean Energy Co Ltd., used the company’s methanol-to-olefins (MTO) process technology to convert methanol derived from coal into ethylene and propylene.

The Wison plant, designed by Wison Engineering, the largest private sector chemical engineering, procurement and construction management (EPC) service provider in China, has an annual production capacity of 300,000 tpa of ethylene and propylene. UOP provided technology licenses, basic engineering, catalysts, adsorbents, specialty equipment, and technical services for the plant.

"This new production facility is an important milestone for the technology, Wison and China, facilitating the coal-to-chemicals industry development roadmap in China," said Liu Haijun, senior vice president and executive director of Wison Engineering.

"The close cooperation between Wison Engineering and UOP on the technological front has pushed forward the development of MTO technology and the upgrading of the modern coal-to-chemicals industry," Haijun continued.

The UOP/Hydro MTO process technology was successfully demonstrated in a semi-commercial-scale unit built and operated by Ineos (then Norsk-Hydro). The Total-UOP OCP process technology was developed jointly by UOP and Total Petrochemicals and demonstrated in an integrated MTO-OCP semi-commercial-scale unit built and operated by Total in Feluy, Belgium.

Edited from various sources by Sam Dodson

Read the article online at: https://www.worldcoal.com/power/03072014/coal_to_chemicals_breakthrough_in_china_1049/