Cita:Shell plans next wave of projects in shift to Asia and Mideast ...(EUROPE/MIDEAST)(Shell Chemicals U.K. Ltd.)
Chemical Week | June 09, 2008 | Alperowicz, Natasha | Copyright

Shell Chemicals continues to shift its assets to Asia and the Mideast and says that a recently announced world-scale propylene oxide-styrene monomer (POSM) project will form part of that strategy (CW,, June 2, p. 9). The company says it has not decided whether to build the POSM unit in Asia or the Mideast. About 30% of Shell Chemicals' assets will be in Asia and the Mideast in 2010, compared with 25% in 2000.
The company is planning to expand its Nanhai complex at Daya Bay, China and is exploring coal-to-chemicals and other opportunities in that country, Ben van Beurden, executive v.p. of Shell Chemicals told CW in an interview during the Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC), held recently in Singapore. A petchem project in Qatar, for which Shell signed a letter of intent in 2005, "is not going at breakneck speed, but it is not the only rabbit in the race," van Beurden says. "We also have many other prospects that we are looking at," he says.
The planned POSM unit will be Shell's fifth and will form part of a larger project to build a steam cracker or expand a cracker. It will be "slightly bigger than" the POSM plants operated by the Ellba joint venture between Shell and BASF, van Beurden says. Ellba operates plants at Moerdijk, the Netherlands and Singapore each with capacity for 550,000 m.t./year of SM and 250,000 m.t./year of PO.

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Shell is the largest merchant seller of styrene, but it consumes most of its PO output for polyols manufacture. The new POSM project is likely "to trigger an investment in polyols by Shell or have an over-the-fence offtake of PO," van Beurden says.
Sources expect the POSM complex to be located in Singapore, where Shell is building a multibillion-dollar cracker. The 800,000-m.t./ year cracker is being constructed at Bukom Island, Singapore, near a Shell refinery, and is due for completion in 2009-10. Shell has a wholly owned POSM plant in Singapore with capacity to produce 350,000 m.t./year of SM and 160,000 m.t./year of PO, in addition to the Ellba unit. Shell has so far announced just one project downstream of the Bukom cracker, a 750,000-m.t./year ethylene glycol unit that will be built at nearby Jurong Island.
Offtake contracts will be in place by the time the cracker comes onstream. "We have more negotiations going on than we have volume available," van Beurden says.
Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia, the site of Shell's Sadaf jv with Sabic, is considered an unlikely location for the POSM complex, even though Shell and Sabic are planning a third SM plant there. The Sadaf SM plant is unlikely to be built at the same time as the POSM complex, van Beurden says. Sadaf "has served us very well over time and particularly now, with very, very high crude oil prices, advantaged feedstocks in the Mideast have become very advantaged," he says. Additional investments in chemicals will be judged on their merits as part of an integrated play with the rest of Shell, "because that gives us a competitive advantage," he adds.

--NATASHA ALPEROWICZ in Singapore