| Shell to Expand Lower Olefins Plant
Houston (June 21, 2001) -- Shell Chemical LP (Shell) today announced plans to
expand its lower olefins plant in Deer Park, Texas, through a major cracker
“debottleneck” (upgrade) project. The additional capacity of approximately 1.1
billion pounds of ethylene a year will come on stream in late 2003. When
completed, the world-scale Deer Park facility is expected to produce about 2.86
billon pounds of ethylene per year.
The debottleneck plans involve a lower olefins plant (OP2) that was built in
1971 but was shut down in 1981 due to overcapacity. In 1996, a partial
refurbishing and start up of the fractionating facilities (cold side) of OP2 was
completed. The new expansion would further refurbish those facilities as well as
recondition all furnaces (hot side), mechanical and companion equipment. In
addition, the unit will be fitted with new current electronic control systems
and the latest nitrogen oxide (Nox) reduction technology.
Bill Colquhoun, Shell’s product vice president (lower olefins), said, ”This
expansion of Deer Park is consistent with our strategy of having product
businesses that have strong market positions and are well integrated with
refinery-based feedstocks.” Shell is currently a leading producer of base
chemicals such as lower olefins and aromatics.
The debottleneck, which will cost around $400 million, is also in line with
Shell’s strategy of investing in “brownfield” sites, which are those that have
been previously developed. As a brownfield expansion,
the unit capital cost will be only 70 percent of the unit cost of a newly built
plant.
A major part of the Deer Park output will feed a higher olefins and detergent
development project at Geismar and a butadiene joint venture at Port Arthur.
Shell is planning to connect these developments by pipelines with Deer Park.
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