UOP Cracks Aromatics and Refinery Projects in Poland and Spain

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Polski Koncern Naftowy ORLEN (PKN) (OTC:POLSKI)(Warsaw, Poland), the largest oil company in Central Europe, has contracted UOP (Des Plaines, Illinois) to supply technology, basic engineering services and equipment for PKN’s new aromatics project at the Plock refinery in Poland.

The new plant will have an annual production capacity of 400,000 tons of paraxylene, which will be used as a building block in the production of plastics, synthetic fibers such as polyester, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) chips for carbonated soft drink and water bottles.

Work on the project, scheduled for completion in 2008, will be undertaken by UOP in Des Plaines in conjunction with the company’s London (United Kingdom) subsidiary using proprietary processes. A Parex process unit will be designed to extract pure paraxylene with an Isomar unit to convert other xylenes to paraxylene. A Tatoray process unit will convert toluene and heavy aromatics to xylenes. The Parex and Tatoray units will be the first to be installed in Poland.

UOP, a Honeywell (NYSE:HON) company, started working with PKN and its forerunner companies at Plock in 1974, and since has installed a range of process units at the site. PKN was formed when two state monopolies, which were at the time Poland’s largest refiner and largest petroleum distributor, were merged in 1999. With a stake in two other refineries, PKN has a refining capacity of 600,000 barrels per day (bpd). PKN owns 75% of the chemical company Anwil. It owns a third of Poland’s gas stations (1,900 sites) and other holdings in Poland. It has about 500 gas stations in Germany and controls the Czech refiner and retailer Unipetrol. In 2005, it had revenues of $13.5 billion and a staff of 21,825 people.

Another longstanding (35 years) UOP project partner in Europe, Spain’s CEPSA (Madrid:CPS) (Madrid, Spain), signed a contract at the end of March for UOP technology to be installed on eight process units in the expansion of its La Rabida refinery in Huelva. In 2005, CEPSA announced that it would be making investments to meet the growing demand in Europe for middle distillates such as diesel fuel and kerosene.

Manuel Abollado, CEPSA’s senior vice president of technology, refining and gas, said, ”The utilization rate of the CEPSA’s refinery capacity is currently (March 2006) roughly 98%. The most cost-effective solution to offset the shortage of middle distillates in the European market includes not only a new distillation train, but also the increase of the conversion level through this latest project from UOP.”

UOP is installing eight different process application units at La Rabida, including two Merox units to remove mercaptans sulfur compounds from LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) as well as from naphthas and gasolines. A Unionfilming unit will provide a highly efficient catalytic process for the desulfurization of cracked and straight-run distillate material. UOP claims that the Unicracking process is the world’s most widely used hydrocracking process for the production of high quality naphtha and distillate materials out of heavy crude fractions.

Once the planned expansion and upgrading process is complete, the refinery will have a middle distillate production capacity of 2.7 million tons per annum.

In April, CEPSA agreed with Bio Oils Energy to build a 200,000-ton per year biodiesel production plant at La Rabida. The $52 million plant is scheduled to start production at the end of 2007. The biodiesel produced from vegetable oils will be blended at a 5% level with regular automotive diesel at CEPSA’s refineries as part of Spain’s ‘cleaner’ and ‘renewable’ energy plan.

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