Iran’s National Petrochemical Company (NPC) has entered a $225mn joint venture to build a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plant at Assaluyeh, with Thailand’s Siam Cement Group, National Petrochemical Company of Thailand and Japan’s Itochu Corporation. MEES understands that the new plant will be separate from the world-scale polyolefins plants under construction in the Pars Special Economic/Energy Zone (Parsee) in Assaluyeh (MEES, 6 December 2004). The new HDPE plant will receive ethylene feedstock through a pipeline grid linking it to the Olefins 9, 10, 11 and 12 complexes in Parsee, which each have worldscale crackers, and which will also feed into the 1,500 km Western Ethylene Pipeline being built to take feedstock from Assaluyeh to eight PE plants to be built throughout Western Iran (MEES, 2 May).
According to Siam Cement, the new plant would have capacity to produce 300,000 tons/year of HDPE and is expected to start commercial operations in the first half of 2008. Joint venture shareholdings were given as: NPC 40%; Siam Cement 38%; National Petrochemical Company of Thailand 12%; and Itochu 10%. Project risk was insured through the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) – part of the World Bank Group – and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI). Siam Cement said the project benefited from competitive and integrated feedstock supply, and added: “This investment will allow for increased production capacity, in response to the ever-increasing global demand for petrochemical products, as existing polyolefins plants are currently running at full utilization.”
