Albemarle Begins Construction for Major Expansion of Texas Catalyst Plant

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Albemarle Corporation (NYSE:ALB) (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) plans to begin construction this month for a major expansion of its catalyst production plant located in Pasadena, Texas. Albemarle publicly announced plans for this project in July of this year and has already secured contractors for the project and expects civil site construction to be complete by the month’s end.

URS Corporation (NYSE:URS ) (San Francisco, California) has been secured as the E&C contractor and Austin Industrial (Houston, Texas) will perform general construction services. This nearly $35 million project consist of major retrofits and the expansion of existing production areas to produce an estimated 10,000 metric tons per year of additional hydroprocessing catalyst (HPC) product. Construction is expected to be complete and production operations starting by late 2006.

Petrochemical plants and petroleum refineries represent some of the largest market opportunities for HPC products and the demand for sophisticated catalysts continues to grow as capital investments in petrochemicals is forecast to climb upward again in 2006 and 2007, as it has for the past two years. North American investments in capital for the petrochemical sector are forecast to exceed $3 billion over the next two years based on project activity identified in Industrialinfo.com’s North American Projects Database, making it the strongest growth sector of the chemical processing industry.

Albemarle recently completed capital work at the Pasadena site related to NOx emission reductions. Construction was complete late this summer for some major retrofits and upgrades of two steam utility boilers located at the Pasadena plant site as first reported by Industrialinfo.com in November of 2002.

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