Shell Eastern Constructs Ethylene Cracker in Singapore

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Petroleum and energy company Shell Eastern Petroleum Limited (Shell Singapore) (Singapore), an arm of global energy and petrochemical company Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE:RDS.A) (The Hague, Netherlands), announced the successful construction and startup of an ethylene cracker at its Shell Eastern Petrochemical Complex (SEPC) project in Singapore on March 22, 2010.

The Ethylene Cracker Complex (ECC), wholly owned by Shell Singapore, boasts a capacity of 800,000 tons per year of ethylene, 155,000 tons per year of butadiene, 450,000 tons per year of propylene, and 230,000 tons per year of benzene. With operations commencing at the ECC, Singapore's ethylene production capacity has been boosted 40%.

The engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) activities of the ECC were executed by a joint venture between EPC company and process technology licensor Chicago Bridge & Iron Company N.V. (NYSE:CBI) (CB&I) (The Hague) and Japanese engineering company Toyo Engineering Corporation (TYO:6330) (Tokyo, Japan).

CB&I company announced that during the entire course of the project, 39 million employee work hours passed without a single instance of lost time. In fact, the company prides itself on a peak time employment of 12,000 workers. It commissioned a ferry line to transport them each day from mainland Singapore to the SEPC units on Pulau Bukom, a small island south of the Singapore mainland.

"We are proud to support Shell's efforts in serving the growing demands of Asia's chemical markets," said Philip K. Asherman, CB&I's president and chief executive officer, in the release. "The successful completion of this project further demonstrates our unique capability to draw upon our expertise in both the EPC and proprietary licensed technology markets. In addition, our safety achievement is particularly remarkable given the complex logistics that were required to execute this project."

The ethylene cracker uses proprietary ethylene cracking technology of Lummus Technology Incorporated (Bloomfield, New Jersey), whereas the butadiene extraction unit uses proprietary technology from leading chemical company BASF SE (ETR:BAS) (Ludwigshafen, Germany) and Lummus Technology.

Ben van Beurden of Shell Singapore said, "The completion of the SEPC will create Shell's biggest, fully integrated refinery and petrochemicals hub, bringing economic and efficiency benefits in terms of operations, logistics and feedstock. The world-class cracker is a shining example of this in practice; it is strategically located adjacent to the Shell Pulau Bukom Refinery, which has been modified to enable it to supply the cracker with feedstock."

The ECC has built-in options for feedstock flexibility, which enable it to process different kinds of feedstock such as liquefied petroleum gas and heavy liquid hydrocarbons like hydrowax.

According to the Shell Singapore release, the olefins and aromatics products, which are the "building blocks" of the petrochemical industry, will be used mainly as feed for the downstream chemical plants situated on Jurong Island, a man-made island southwest of the Singapore mainland. These plants would include Shell Singapore's mono-ethylene glycol manufacturing unit, which commenced production in December 2009. The availability of additional feeds for downstream chemicals production is expected to encourage the growth and diversification of the chemicals cluster in Singapore.

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