zhejiang rongsheng refinery free sample

China"s private refiner Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical is set to start trial runs at its second 200,000 b/d crude distillation unit at the 400,000 b/d phase 2 refinery by the end of March, a source with close knowledge about the matter told S&P Global Platts March 9.

ZPC cracked 23 million mt of crude in 2020, according the the source. Platts data showed that the utilization rate of its phase 1 refinery hit as high as 130% in a few months last year.

Started construction in the second half of 2019, units of the Yuan 82.9 billion ($12.74 billion) phase 2 refinery almost mirror those in phase 1, which has two CDUs of 200,000 b/d each. But phase 1 has one 1.4 million mt/year ethylene unit while phase 2 plans to double the capacity with two ethylene units.

With the entire phase 2 project online, ZPC expects to lift its combined petrochemicals product yield to 71% from 65% for the phase 1 refinery, according to the source.

Zhejiang Petroleum, a joint venture between ZPC"s parent company Rongsheng Petrochemical and Zhejiang Energy Group, planned to build 700 gas stations in Zhejiang province by end-2022 as domestic retail outlets of ZPC.

Established in 2015, ZPC is a JV between textile companies Rongsheng Petrochemical, which owns 51%, Tongkun Group, at 20%, as well as chemicals company Juhua Group, also 20%. The rest 9% stake was reported to have transferred to Saudi Aramco from the Zhejiang provincial government. But there has been no update since the agreement was signed in October 2018.

Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical Co Ltd, one of two new major refineries built in China in 2019, said it has started up the remaining units in the first phase of its refinery and petrochemical complex.

The complex, in east China’s Zhoushan city, is now producing oil products and chemicals to commercial specifications, Zhejiang Petrochemical said on its website.

The company, 51% owned by private chemical group Zhejiang Rongsheng Holdings, said it has started test production at ethylene, aromatics and other downstream facilities, without giving further details.

Zhejiang Petrochemical started a first 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) crude processing unit in late May, following on from the start of a 400,000-bpd refinery owned by another private chemical major Hengli Petrochemical.

The newly started units at Zhejiang Petrochemical should include a second 200,000-bpd crude unit, a 1.2 million tonnes per year (tpy) ethylene unit and a 2 million tpy paraxylene unit, according to several industry sources with knowledge of the plant’s operations.

SINGAPORE, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Rongsheng Petrochemical, the trading arm of Chinese private refiner Zhejiang Petrochemical, has bought at least 5 million barrels of crude for delivery in December and January next year in preparation for starting a new crude unit by year-end, five trade sources said on Wednesday.

Rongsheng bought at least 3.5 million barrels of Upper Zakum crude from the United Arab Emirates and 1.5 million barrels of al-Shaheen crude from Qatar via a tender that closed on Tuesday, the sources said.

Rongsheng’s purchase helped absorbed some of the unsold supplies from last month as the company did not purchase any spot crude in past two months, the sources said.

Zhejiang Petrochemical plans to start trial runs at one of two new crude distillation units (CDUs) in the second phase of its refinery-petrochemical complex in east China’s Zhoushan by the end of this year, a company official told Reuters. Each CDU has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day (bpd).

Zhejiang Petrochemical started up the first phase of its complex which includes a 400,000-bpd refinery and a 1.2 million tonne-per-year ethylene plant at the end of 2019. (Reporting by Florence Tan and Chen Aizhu, editing by Louise Heavens and Christian Schmollinger)

Were the extra barrels needed to satisfy unusually strong refinery demand? A desire to stockpile supply for later consumption? Or perhaps add more cushion to strategic reserves?

Rongsheng Petrochemical Co., Ltd. is a China-based company principally engaged in the research, development, manufacturing and distribution of refining products, petrochemicals and chemical fibers. Rongsheng has an annual production capability of 2 million tons of aromatic hydrocarbon, over 13 million tons of pure terephthalic acid (PTA), 2 million tons of PET, 1 million tons of POY and FDY, 0.45 millon tons of DTY. Rongsheng‘s total capability of PTA ranks the first of the world. Rongsheng persists in “Two-way of Vertical and Horizontal” development strategy and recently developed a green refining-petrochemical integrated project with a total capacity of 40 million tons per annum, via its subsidiary Zhejiang Petroleum and Chemicals Co., Ltd. (ZPC).

(1) ZPC: Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical Co., Ltd, established in Zhoushan, Zhejiang on June 18, 2015, is a mixed-ownership enterprise jointly formed by the private enterprise Rongsheng Petrochemical Co., Ltd.（holding 51% of shares）， provincial state-owned enterprise Zhejiang Juhua Investment Co., Ltd.（holding 20% of shares）, the private enterprises Zhejiang Tongkun Investment Co., Ltd.（holding 20% of shares） and Zhoushan Marine Comprehensive Development and Investment Co., Ltd.(holding 9% of shares), which will be the first kind of mixing economy enterprise in China in the Refinery and Petrochemical Industry. ZPC’s first phase project includes 20 million tons per year refinery and 1400 KTA Ethylene Complex.

Li had reason to celebrate. Saudi Arabia’s state oil company agreed to buy a stake in a refinery that his firm, Rongsheng Petrochemical Co., is building there. The high-profile deal illustrated the potential for Zhoushan and the wider Zhejiang province, in which the archipelago is located, to play an outsize role in energy markets. The local government’s ambition for a processing, storage and trading hub is spurring a rush for a piece of the pie.

Now, after other cities such as Hangzhou and Ningbo turned Zhejiang into an affluent manufacturing hub, Zhoushan is seeking to take advantage of its location to become an energy-trading center. It’s also home to a part of China’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

One of the biggest projects in the works is Rongsheng’s energy and petrochemical complex, which will process about 400,000 barrels a day of oil and is set to start operations by the end of 2018. There are plans to double the plant’s capacity by 2020, which would elevate it to the ranks of the largest refineries in the world.

While Rongsheng is preparing to start its refinery, ENN Energy Holdings Ltd. has begun operations at a liquefied natural gas receiving terminal in Zhoushan. The project will be able to handle 3 million metric tons a year in its first phase, with annual capacity to increase to 5 million tons by 2021.

Exxon Mobil signed a preliminary deal to supply 1 million metric tons of LNG to Zhejiang Provincial Energy Group for 20 years beginning in the early 2020s. BP was said to be in the process of forming an oil-trading venture with Wuchan Zhongda Group, which is controlled by the local government, while a collaboration between Zhejiang Petroleum Co. and Glencore is planning to trade 10 million tons of oil a year.

“Unlike other conferences that tend to be forums for discussing regional or global market trends, this one is more narrowly focused on the Zhejiang market, which is where there are new opportunities,” Michal Meidan, an analyst at industry consultant Energy Aspects Ltd., said during the IPEC event.

Two Chinese newcomers make the ranking: TongKun Group at 48 and Hengyi Petrochemical at 50. Both are polyester producers that make their own raw materials. Hengyi also has a large, integrated nylon 6 business. Both companies join similar Chinese firms, like Hengli Petrochemical and Rongsheng Petrochemical. All these companies have been building massive complexes for aromatics and derivatives, in many cases swamping entire segments of the chemical industry—such as purified terephthalic acid—with new capacity that is well beyond the scale of players outside China.

PetroChina heaped on the growth in 2021, expanding by 42% from 2020 as China’s economy recovered from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. New projects in China will only further the company’s expansion. This year, it is due to complete the $10 billion Guangdong Petrochemical project. The massive effort includes a refinery, an aromatics unit, and an ethylene cracker. PetroChina has also finished work on an ethylene project in Tarim that will use domestically produced ethane as its feedstock. In Jieyang, an enormous $1 billion acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene plant with 600,000 metric tons per year of capacity is in the works.

Some chemical companies have been ditching commodities to focus on specialties. LyondellBasell Industries is exiting refining so it can better home in on commodities. In April, the company said it would shutter its 100-year-old Houston refinery by the end of 2023. The refinery, part of LyondellBasell Industries since it spun off from Atlantic Richfield in 1989, has long been an issue for the company. It was a joint venture with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA for more than a decade before Lyondell bought out its partner for $2.1 billion in 2006. Company officials say they may repurpose the property for sustainability projects such as a plastics pyrolysis plant. Meanwhile, LyondellBasell has been steadily growing its commodity chemical business. It bought 50% stakes in ethylene complexes in the US and China. And according to newly surfaced government documents, it is considering building a high-density polyethylene plant in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The Indian conglomerate has abandoned plans to put its refining and chemical operations—which it calls Oil to Chemicals—into a stand-alone business. It also walked away from negotiations with Saudi Aramco to sell a 20% stake in the business for $15 billion. Instead, Reliance Industries is undertaking what may turn out to be an even bigger change in direction. Last year, it announced an ambitious goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2035. Reliance is setting aside 2,000 hectares of land at its massive Jamnagar refinery and petrochemical complex for factories that would make photovoltaic modules, batteries, electrolyzers, and fuel cells. Along these lines, Reliance bought Faradion, a British sodium-ion battery start-up, for $135 million. It will spend another $35 million to bring the new battery chemistry to market. It also purchased the Norwegian solar cell maker REC Group for $771 million.

A Rongsheng Petrochemical subsidiary, Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical, started up the second phase of its massive refining and petrochemical complex in Zhejiang, China, in 2021. With capacity now doubled, the facility can process 40 million metric tons (t) of oil per year. The facility has a large petrochemical output: up to 6.6 million t of aromatics and 1.4 million t of ethylene per year. The expansion allowed the company to start making specialized polymers, such as acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene and polycarbonate.

TongKun Group is one of a handful of integrated Chinese polyester producers that have grown so big in recent years that they are now finding their way into the Global Top 50. The company is based in Tongxiang, in the coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang. It was founded in 1981 with the name Tongxiang County Chemical Fiber Factory. TongKun now has more than 30,000 employees as well as 8.6 million metric tons (t) per year of polyester filament production capacity and 4.2 million t of capacity for the polyester raw material purified terephthalic acid.

New refinery start-ups in China are helping to absorb some of the crude oil from the Middle East amid an otherwise depressed market with stalled demand recovery.

Large private Chinese refiner Zhejiang Petrochemical has been buying millions of barrels of crude from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Iraq in recent days, for delivery in December and January, oil traders told Reuters and Bloomberg.

Rongsheng Petrochemical, the trading arm of Zhejiang Petrochemical, has bought at least 5 million barrels of UAE’s Upper Zakum crude and Qatar’s al-Shaheen crude in a tender this week, trading sources told Reuters. According to traders who spoke to Bloomberg, Rongsheng Petrochemical has purchased at least 7 million barrels of crude from the Middle East.

The company was looking to procure oil from the Middle East as it prepares to begin trial runs at a new refinery by the end of this year, sources told Reuters.