Exxon pushes ahead with plans to raise Asia
Exxon pushes ahead with plans to raise Asia
SINGAPORE (Reuter): Exxon Corp is going ahead with a US$450 million chemical investment in Thailand despite the country's current economic turmoil as part of efforts to double Asia- Pacific revenue, a senior company official said yesterday.
"We have an attractive refinery (in Thailand) and we think we have the fundamentals to start work on the aromatics plant," said Ken Robertson, senior vice president, basic chemicals and intermediates of Exxon Chemical Co, a unit of Exxon Corp.
Robertson said the company was not concerned with the current economic turmoil in Thailand.
"We are looking at the long term. We were projecting they were going to be in a bad state," he said.
Robertson said the Exxon board will make a final decision on the project in September and he expected them to approve the building of the plant for a commerical start up around 2000.
The Thai Board of Investment in May granted incentives for the 11.1 billion baht project to build a 350,000 ton-per-year (tpa) paraxylene plant at Sri Racha where Exxon currently operates a 145,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery.
Paraxylene is a feedstock chemical for the production of polyester and fibre products.
Exxon Chemical's global earnings in 1996 totalled $1.2 billion compared to $2.02 billion in 1995.
Robertson said Exxon Chemical was hoping to raise its revenue from the Asia-Pacific region from the current "under 10 percent to over 20 percent" once the Thai plant as well as the $2 billion Singapore complex comes onstream in mid 2000.
Robertson said construction of the Singapore steam cracker, which makes basic petrochemicals, will begin in mid 1998 once land reclamation works are completed.
The steam cracker, Exxon's largest single plant worldwide, will produce annually 800,000 tons of ethylene, 400,000 tons of propylene. It will integrated with a 450,000-ton polyethylene and a 275,000-ton polypropylene plants.
Exxon said the company will build a 170-megawatt co-generation power plant at the new complex that will meet about 75 percent of the energy needs of the steam cracker as well as the existing refinery and the newly commissioned aromatics plant.
Exxon operates a 230,000-bpd refinery adjacent to the proposed steam cracker and has a 50-percent share in a new 350,000-tpa paraxylene plant.
Robertson said the company was in talks to buy gas from Indonesia's Natuna field that is expected to be piped into Singapore in 2000.
Exxon is also hoping to start up a plastizer plant in China at the same time that the Singapore complex comes onstream. Robertson said the company was in talks with Sinopec to build the 50,000-tpa plant.