Grangemouth expansion and new licensing for BP
15 Jan 2000
The first phase of a project to lift BP Chemicals' Grangemouth plant into the first division of olefin complexes has begun with a £35million expansion of one of the complex's ethylene crackers. The project is intended to ready Grangemouth for new petrochemical feedstocks to be piped in from the North Sea.
The project, slated to take 17 months, involves building two new furnaces and a C3 hydrogenation unit on the complex's G4 cracker. This will lift the cracker's capacity by 19 per cent, to 320 000t/a.
BP Chemicals plans to pump £500million into Grangemouth, so that it can process the ethane, propane and butane that will be pumped into the site by the new Forties Pipeline System from the turn of the century (see PE December, p5). Later phases of the expansion project include further work on the crackers to increase their total capacity from 700 000t/a to over a million tonnes per year; a polyethylene plant, and a `world-scale' polypropylene plant in partnership with Elf Atochem.
* BP Chemicals is to add its polystyrene and expandable polystyrene manufacturing technologies to its licensing portfolio, in partnership with Norwegian contractor ABB Lummus Global. The technology involves two processes - the solvent-free continuous mass process, which makes high-impact and general purpose PS, and a high-productivity suspension reaction to make the expanded grades. Lummus will market and license the technology, providing basic engineering packages and offering engineering, procurement and construction services, while BP will provide technology support during plant design and construction.
