Kuwait’s Equate announced on 14 October the start of commercial operation of its 750,000 t/y ethylene glycol plant at Oyster Creek, near Freeport in Texas. The plant was developed by the MEGlobal subsidiary of Equate, which in turn is a JV of Kuwait’s state petchems firm PIC and US firm Dow Chemical, each with 42.5%, with Kuwaiti investors Boubyan (9%) and Qurain (6%). MEGlobal announced the start of test production last month (MEES, 13 September).
The plant was built within a Dow-operated compound and uses ethylene feedstock made by Dow from ethane recovered from locally-produced shale gas. Equate awarded the construction contract for the plant in late 2016 (MEES, 25 November 2016). It is Equate’s first venture into US petchems, although the company already had just over 1mn t/y of ethylene glycol capacity at three plants in Alberta, Canada. Equate is currently developing a 550,000 t/y propane dehydrogenation (PDH) and polypropylene (PP) plant at Redwater in Alberta with Canada’s Pembina and aims for plant start-up in mid-2013 (MEES, 8 February). (CONTINUED - 166 WORDS)