Dec 17 2008
Uhde has been awarded a contract by Risun Chemical Company of China to build an aromatics plant at Tangshan (Hebei Province), some 150km east of Beijing. The new plant will produce top-quality benzene, toluene and xylene valuable aromatic fractions from coke oven light oil, mainly for the Chinese market. High-purity aromatics are processed by the chemical industry into essential intermediate products used, for example, in the production of plastics.
The plant, which is designed for a throughput capacity of 200,000 tonnes of coke oven light oil per year, is due to come on stream in 2010 and joins a major high-purity aromatics plant being built by Xingtai Risun Coal & Chemical Company, a subsidiary of the Risun Group, at Xingtai, 450km from Tangshan, using Uhde’s process. This second plant will start up around mid-2009 and together the two plants will mean that the Risun Group will gain a production capacity of 260,000 tonnes of high-purity aromatics per year.
Another two contracts received by Uhde in China have come from Chinese coke producers. One is for the construction of a high-purity aromatics plant at a coke plant site in Qujing (Yunnan Province) and the other will be built at a coke plant site in Wuhan (Hubei Province). Both plants will be based on Uhde’s Morphylane® process.
To add to these three successes in China, Uhde has won contracts for another three aromatics plants over the past 15 months in Kazakhstan, South Korea and Qatar, respectively. Together, these plant contracts represent an annual production volume of more than 2 million tonnes of high-purity aromatics. Uhde's scope of services includes the licence, basic engineering and assistance with the commissioning and training of the operating personnel. Some of these contracts were won in cooperation with our French strategic technology partner AXENS.
The aromatics plants will be based on Uhde’s Morphylane® extractive distillation process which uses the specially developed solvent N-formylmorpholine to recover aromatics, such as benzene, toluene and xylene. In addition to achieving purities of more than 99.9 wt%, the Morphylane® process is also outstanding in its high yield and extremely low energy consumption.
More than 14 million tonnes a year of pure aromatics are now produced at over 60 plants based on Uhde's Morphylane® process worldwide. With these new contracts and the successful commissioning of Morphylane® plants in Spain, Japan and again China, Uhde has added to its list of key references in the refining technology sector and consolidated its position as a global market and technology leader in the field of extractive distillation and the recovery of aromatics from pyrolysis gasoline, reformate and coke oven light oil.