rongsheng petrochemical annual report 2018 brands

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* China’s Zhejiang Petrochemicals, which is owned by Rongsheng Group, has been awarded a quota to import 5 million tonnes of crude oil this year, a statement from the Zhoushan Bureau of Commerce in Zhejiang province said on Thursday.

* In April, Chinese private chemical producer Hengli Group won import quotas of 400,000 barrels per day (bpd), the largest ever for a private refiner, as it challenges the country’s smaller independent plants in an oversupplied Chinese fuel market. (Reporting by Josephine Mason, Meng Meng and Aizhu Chen Editing by Susan Fenton)

A coalescing of factors has led to arrested growth across the chemicals sector this year, with the brand value of the top 25 most valuable chemicals brands contracting by 8% on average, according to the latest report by Brand Finance - the world"s leading independent brand valuation consultancy.

SABIC (down 7% to US$4.0 billion) is committed to its vision of becoming the world’s largest petrochemical company by 2030, undertaking several strategic partnerships over the last year and aligning with the chemical arm of oil and gas leader Saudi Aramco. The brand has strategically aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and developed more open and creative collaborations with other companies, NGOs, academia, and governments to better meet the expectations of customers and stakeholders.

Zhejiang-based Rongsheng Petrochemical (up 14% to US$1.6 billion) is the sector’s fastest growing brand after seeing profits more than triple in the past year, bolstered by the launch of its 400,000 barrel-per-day Zhejiang Petrochemical Co (ZPC).

Financial Associated Press, December 29 - Rongsheng Petrochemical announced that Zhejiang Petrochemical Co., Ltd. had an annual output of 300000 tons of EVA plant put into operation.

Thus, the healthiest sales increases seen in the Global Top 50 came from petrochemical companies. Sabic, Formosa Plastics, PetroChina, LyondellBasell Industries, and ExxonMobil Chemical all clocked in with sales increases of 40% or more. Also riding the crest of the commodity price wave are fertilizer makers such as Yara, Nutrien, and Mosaic, which posted astounding increases in sales.

A few companies in the 2021 ranking fell off in 2022 because they didn’t have enough sales to make the cut. These are the US petrochemical maker Westlake, the US agricultural chemical producer Corteva Agriscience, and the Japanese chemical makers Tosoh and DIC.

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.

For the third consecutive year, BASF heads the Global Top 50. Because it has a home base in Germany, the company was strongly impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. BASF pledged in April to wind down operations in Russia and Belarus, which represent about 1% of its sales. The company says it will continue supplying agrochemicals to these countries to avoid disrupting the world’s delicate food supply chain. BASF has also been affected by the severe increase in European natural gas prices that the war has exacerbated. In March, BASF chairman Martin Brudermüller told a Houston audience at the IHS Markit World Petrochemical Conference that “European industry really has to rethink” its strategy, given its dependence on natural gas from Russia. The war has also affected the company’s Wintershall Dea energy joint venture, which has extensive operations in Russia. During the first quarter, BASF took a $1.2 billion write-off related to the cancellation of Nord Stream 2, a natural gas pipeline between Germany and Russia that Wintershall helped finance. BASF is also anticipating the coming energy transition. The company is carving out its emission catalyst business, which it acquired with its 2006 purchase of Engelhard. The move is a response to the dim outlook for internal combustion engine vehicles and could be a prelude to a sale. BASF has simultaneously been trying to grow as a producer of materials for electric vehicle batteries and aims to spend $5 billion on production capacity outside Europe.

Once again, the blue-chip Chinese firm Sinopec is the second-largest chemical company in the world. Sinopec is working on an enormous lineup of capital expansions in China. Last year in Zhenhai, it started up an ethylene cracker project and began work on a propane dehydrogenation plant that it hopes to finish in 2024. The firm is building a cracker and derivatives project in Tianjin that it expects to complete next year and is bringing another one to completion in Hainan this year. Sinopec is also constructing a massive purified terephthalic acid complex in Yizheng. Like many energy and chemical firms, Sinopec has gotten into the act of carbon abatement. In Zibo earlier this year, it started up a carbon-capture-and-storage project that will handle 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

In 2020, Dow revealed its aspiration to reach carbon emission neutrality by 2050, and at an investor event in October, it detailed its plans to get there. The company aims to spend $1 billion per year, about a third of its capital budget, to decarbonize its petrochemical sites around the world one by one. Topping that list is Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, where in an industry first, the company will build a carbon-neutral ethylene cracker. An autothermal reformer will process the cracker’s off-gases to generate hydrogen that will be burned in the cracker’s furnaces instead of natural gas. Dow will capture the resulting carbon dioxide and inject it into Alberta’s CO2 pipeline for sequestration. Dow’s sustainability push extends beyond greenhouse gases and into plastic waste. At the October event, for example, the company said it would collaborate with Fuenix Ecogy to build a waste plastics pyrolysis plant in the Netherlands.

The Saudi giant Sabic has a large presence in Europe owing to its acquisition of petrochemical businesses from DSM and Huntsman more than a decade ago. And while the company gained a North American engineering polymer business in 2007 with the purchase of GE Plastics, a US toehold in petrochemicals has been more elusive. Sabic finally accomplished this long-term objective in January when its $10 billion joint venture with ExxonMobil Chemical, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, started up near Corpus Christi, Texas. The venture produces ethylene and the derivatives polyethylene and ethylene glycol. The project is noteworthy because of how quickly it was erected: in just over 2 years. Some recent US petrochemical projects have experienced delays longer than that.

Formosa Plastics’ proposed $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in St. James Parish, Louisiana, suffered a major setback last year when the US Army Corps of Engineers ordered a full environmental review. That process could take longer than 2 years, according to local activists. The massive project, which would include an ethylene cracker, polyethylene plants, and other facilities, was originally unveiled in 2015. While the complex would be an important diversification move for the Taiwan-based company, S&P Global Ratings noted in a report in October that Formosa’s management could be reaching the end of its patience for delays and local opposition. “We see diminishing probability that the planned mega project in Louisiana will go ahead, given the changing political atmosphere in the U.S.,” the credit rating agency wrote.

Since its inception in the 1990s, Ineos has expanded by acquiring established divisions of large chemical companies. Most recently, in early 2021, it bought BP’s aromatics business, a major producer of purified terephthalic acid, for $5 billion. Since then, Ineos has been focusing on sustainability. In September, it announced a $1.3 billion plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60% at its Grangemouth, Scotland, petrochemical complex by 2030. It will do so by capturing the greenhouse gas and sending it to the proposed Acorn CO2 system, which aims to inject it under the North Sea. In October, Ineos said it plans to spend $2.3 billion on green hydrogen projects. It will construct a 20 MW electrolyzer, powered by alternative energy, in Rafnes, Norway. And in Cologne, Germany, Ineos wants to build a 100 MW electrolyzer that will make hydrogen for green ammonia. Separately, Ineos is installing a unit in Cologne to extract acetonitrile made during acrylonitrile production. Acetonitrile is a solvent used in butadiene extraction and in high-performance liquid chromatography. Its use is acutely growing as a solvent in the production of oligonucleotides for RNA vaccines.

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.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil has been advancing sustainability initiatives. In March, it unveiled plans to build a blue hydrogen facility at its refining and petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas. The project would capture 10 million metric tons (t) per year of carbon dioxide generated in the hydrogen production process, reducing the site’s carbon footprint by 30%. The project would connect to a massive carbon-capture-and-storage hub in the region that ExxonMobil is spearheading. Also in Baytown, the company is building a facility that will use new chemical technology to recycle waste plastics. It hopes to process 500,000 t of plastics annually around the world by 2026 and is also considering projects in Canada, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

Within a year of taking over the helm of Japan’s largest chemical maker, CEO Jean-Marc Gilson, a veteran of Dow Corning and Roquette, launched a major restructuring initiative. Mitsubishi Chemical Group plans to carve out its petrochemical and coal-based chemical businesses as a separate company and then exit them by the end of its 2023 fiscal year. The units, which make olefins, polyolefins, and other bulk petrochemicals, generate about 20% of the company’s sales. Mitsubishi Chemical Group wants to focus on more specialized areas, such as electronic materials and the life sciences.

The expansion program at this Chinese firm is a good illustration of just how massively and systematically the Chinese petrochemical industry has been growing in recent years. For example, Hengli Petrochemical plans to bring on line 5 million metric tons (t) per year of capacity for the polyester raw material purified terephthalic acid (PTA) later this year in Huizhou, China. The company is building a 450,000 t plant to make poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT), which will consume some of the PTA as a raw material. Hengli is building a 300,000 t adipic acid unit, also to help feed PBAT production. And it is working on a big polyester fiber expansion and recently opened a large ethylene cracker.

Like its industrial gas rivals Air Liquide and Air Products, Linde is focused on carbon reduction. In May, the German firm and BP announced that they would collaborate on a large carbon-capture-and-storage project on the Texas Gulf Coast. The firms aim to make blue hydrogen, produced by reforming natural gas and storing the by-product carbon dioxide. Linde will distribute this hydrogen to customers via its regional pipeline network. The firms aim to store some 15 million metric tons of CO2 annually in underground formations. In Austria, Linde is building a plant to make green hydrogen—derived from water electrolysis powered by renewable energy—for sale to the semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies. To help shore up helium supply, Linde is adding an extraction unit at a natural gas liquefaction plant in Texas. The project will increase the world’s supply of helium by more than 3%.

Late last year, the French industrial gas giant Air Liquide got into a business that is as high tech as a chemical business can get. It signed an agreement with the Canadian nuclear power operator Laurentis Energy Partners to buy helium-3, a light isotope of helium formed via the β decay of the heavy hydrogen isotope tritium. Air Liquide will market 5,000–10,000 L of the 3He annually. The isotope is needed for quantum computing, which must operate at temperatures as close to absolute zero as possible. Conventional liquid 4He cooling can get down to 1–4 K, and getting below that requires mixing in some 3He. Separately, Air Liquide is building what it calls the world’s largest biomethane plant, at a Chicago-area landfill. The industrial gas maker estimates that the collected methane could generate 380 GW h of energy annually. It is also building a methane recovery plant in Wisconsin.

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.

The Chinese polyurethane and petrochemical maker has been rocketing up the Global Top 50 because of its prodigious growth in recent years. And 2021 was another enormous year for Wanhua Chemical—its revenues nearly doubled from 2020. Ambitious capital expansion projects have helped fuel the growth. In Yantai, China, it opened an ethylene cracker and derivatives plants and revamped methylene diphenyl diisocyanate production. In April, the company announced it would spend $3.6 billion to build a chemical complex in Penglai, China. The project, to be completed in 2024, will feature a propane dehydrogenation unit as well as downstream plants for polypropylene, propylene oxide, and other chemicals. The company also started producing cathode materials and the biodegradable polymer poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate).

It is possible that Braskem could change hands in the near future. Novonor, the Brazilian conglomerate formerly known as Odebrecht, is facing hefty fines because of a Brazilian corruption scandal. The US Department of Justice alone is demanding $2.6 billion from the company. As a consequence, Novonor has been looking to sell its 38% interest in Braskem, which includes control of more than 50% of Braskem’s common stock. Sale talks are nothing new for Braskem. The company discussed a sale to LyondellBasell Industries in 2018 and 2019, but nothing came of the negotiations. In 2020, Novonor and Braskem’s other major shareholder, the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras, planned to float Braskem shares on public markets. That plan was shelved earlier this year because of financial market volatility. And in April, the private equity firm Apollo Capital was rumored to be bidding for Novonor’s stake.

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.

The Thai polyester maker Indorama Ventures made another big acquisition to diversify its business earlier this year when it bought the ethoxylated surfactant maker Oxiteno from the Brazilian conglomerate Ultrapar Participações for $1.3 billion. Oxiteno has about $1 billion in annual sales. In 2020, Indorama bought Huntsman’s US-based surfactant unit, its first big move into surfactants. Indorama, already a big mechanical recycler of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), is plunging into the chemical recycling of plastics. It plans to build a plant in Longlaville, France, that will depolymerize PET using an enzymatic process from the start-up Carbios. The facility will be close to an Indorama PET plant.

Solvay, one of Europe’s oldest chemical companies, plans to split in two. The larger of the two resulting firms would house its specialty polymers, aerospace composites, consumer ingredients, and aroma chemical businesses and have $6.6 billion in annual sales. The other would have $4.5 billion in sales and make commodity chemicals such as soda ash and peroxides. The move builds on a company plan announced in 2021 to carve out and possibly sell its soda ash business. The bigger split-up scheme got pushback from financial analysts, who questioned the advantages of combining businesses as varied as aerospace materials and consumer product ingredients. Solvay executives responded that specialty chemical businesses bear similarities, such as their appetite for capital allocation.

Over the past year, Arkema has placed a lot of emphasis on one of its core businesses, adhesives, as well as on an emerging business, battery materials. The French specialty chemical maker bought Ashland’s adhesives business in February for $1.65 billion. The business has $360 million in annual sales of water-based polyurethane wood glues and acrylic, pressure-sensitive adhesives for packaging labels and other applications. In 2015, Arkema bought the adhesives maker Bostik from Total for $2.2 billion. With Nippon Shokubai, Arkema is studying the feasibility of producing lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide electrolyte salts, used in next-generation batteries, in France. Arkema’s goal is to have sales to the battery market of at least $1 billion per year by 2030. To that end, it is also expanding capacity for poly(vinylidene fluoride) in Pierre-Bénite, France. The polymer is used as a binder and separator material in lithium-ion batteries.

Asahi Kasei has been making a push into biobased chemicals. It plans to make the building-block chemical acrylonitrile from biomass-derived propylene at its Tongsuh Petrochemical subsidiary in South Korea. It will use a mass-balance approach, in which biomass fed into a conventional petrochemical plant is credited to a share of products that are made. And at a conference in Washington, DC, in March, company officials said Asahi would commercialize nylon 6,6 made with biobased hexamethylenediamine from Genomatica. Meanwhile, the Japanese company is exiting one of its old-line operations. In August, the company said it was leaving the clear styrene block copolymer business by 2023 because of deteriorating profitability.

Johnson Matthey (JM) is trying to find its footing. The British firm makes precious-metal catalysts for catalytic converters and is thus heavily reliant on internal combustion automotive engines, which face a bleak long-term outlook. The company has also been exiting noncore businesses. In June, it closed a deal to sell its pharmaceutical chemical business to the private equity firm Altaris Capital Partners for $430 million. The firm is retaining a 30% stake in the business, which generates more than $300 million in sales annually. Additionally, JM is selling its European battery material operations to Australia’s EV Metals Group and a battery material plant in Canada to Nano One Materials. But a possibility remains that JM itself will change hands. In April, US industrial firm Standard Industries revealed purchased a 5% stake in the company. Machinations like this often foretell a takeover. Standard bought another catalyst firm, W. R. Grace, in 2021.

In a transaction that will allow it to focus strictly on petrochemicals and polymers, Borealis received an $870 million offer in June for its nitrogen fertilizer business from the Czech agricultural conglomerate Agrofert. The business had sales of about $1.5 billion in 2021. The deal works out nicely for Borealis, which had an earlier overture of $520 million from EuroChem Group. Borealis walked away from that deal because of the war in Ukraine and EuroChem’s Russian connections. Borealis might have missed an opportunity to be affiliated with a high-end polymer business. OMV, the Austrian refiner that owns 75% of Borealis, put in a bid to purchase DSM’s engineering polymer business. But OMV lost out to a partnership between Advent International and Lanxess.

PTT Global Chemical rejoins the Global Top 50 after a 1-year absence. The Thai petrochemical maker made a major diversification play late last year when it purchased the German coatings resins maker Allnex for $4.8 billion from the private equity firm Advent International. Allnex has annual sales of about $2.4 billion. PTT’s backing, Allnex management hopes, will help it expand into Asia. In the US, PTT has had a large petrochemical complex on the drawing board since 2015. But its air permits from the state of Ohio expired in February. The company said at the time that it was seeking new permits that aligned with its goals of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It subsequently unveiled a plastics recycling project for the state.

The main issue at Sasol for several years was a petrochemical complex in Lake Charles, Louisiana, that went $4 billion over budget and led to a major management shake-up. Another recent setback for the firm came in November, when South African regulators blocked the sale of its business in sodium cyanide to Draslovka, already a strong player in that field. Now there are signs of green shoots at the South African firm. Sasol and South Korea’s Lotte Chemical are studying the construction of a plant to make battery electrolyte solvents in Lake Charles or at Sasol’s complex in Marl, Germany. Sasol would provide the raw materials.

Lanxess is planning a likely exit from the polymer business. The German company and the private equity firm Advent International formed a joint venture to buy DSM’s engineering polymer business—a producer of high-end nylon resins—for $4.1 billion. Lanxess is contributing its own business, which makes polybutylene terephthalate and nylon 6, to the partnership. It will own an up to 40% stake in the joint venture for 3 years, after which it will have an option to sell. At the same time, Lanxess is growing in specialty chemicals. Earlier this month, it completed the purchase of International Flavors & Fragrances’ microbial control business for about $1.3 billion. The business, which once belonged to Dow, makes glutaraldehyde biocides and isothiazolinone-based antimicrobials and has $450 million in annual sales.

This is the first year in the Global Top 50 for Hengyi Petrochemical, a Chinese firm that primarily makes polyester and nylon 6. Hengyi affiliates recently started a massive refining and petrochemical complex in Brunei. The 2.1 million metric tons per year of p-xylene and benzene made in this new complex is being sent to China for conversion into the polyester raw material purified terephthalic acid and the nylon precursor caprolactam. The company is planning a second phase of the Brunei project, which will include an ethylene cracker and derivatives units.