Question
-
What strategies can be considered to meet the expanding paraxylene market?
Apr-2025
Answers
-
Keith Couch, Honeywell UOP, keith.couch@ honeywell.com
The PX market continues to grow with increased demand for beverage bottles, food packing, and textured polyester yarns, a market truly driven by bottles and shirts. China has driven much of the growth in PX to feed its fibre production. Whereas a single train PX unit was ~600 kMTA as recently as 2010, as PET trains have increased in size, single train PX complexes are now ~2,400 kMTA. This has driven an economy of scale that almost requires a crude-to-chemicals complex to feed it.
Around 2011, the investment wave of PX units built in Korea consumed most of the world’s remaining merchant heavy naphtha. This put an end to the historical cycle in the aromatics market. Since then, most PX complexes have been integrated with either a dedicated new refinery or associated with a firm intentionally reducing its exposure to gasoline markets. The latter takes a committed move.
The production of PX from refinery feedstocks pulls much of the C7-C10 molecules out of the gasoline pool so it can be reformed into aromatics. This strands a lot of C4s and light naphtha that can no longer be soaked up into a residual gasoline pool. The result is typically another set of investments to alkylate the C4s or shedding these materials to the merchant market that could involve the following options:
• Go big: Economy of scale matters in the PX world. Most firms will need to fill up at least a world-scale PET plant to be competitive.
• Controlling feedstock supply: The days of competing with merchant mixed-aromatics feedstocks are over. These plants have the highest cost, followed by those that buy merchant heavy naphtha. These are the assets that have the hardest time to compete.
• Integrating the value chain: The PX market is about bottles and shirts. As economy of scale and crude-to-chemicals have taken off, there needs to be an integrated value chain to truly compete.
• Embrace the latest tech: While PX technology has been in the market since the early 1970s, large advancements in the technology have driven step-change lower coefficient of performance (COP) and economy of scale since 2014 to date. Latest designs, catalysts, and adsorbents have reduced the energy footprint by more than 30%, and equipment tonnage and cost by 25% per tonne of PX. UOP’s Light Desorbent PX (LDPX) technology was launched in 2015 and now accounts for about 35% of the world’s total PX production. Older tech can be revamped but often faces the challenges of limited feedstock to take advantage of scale.
• High-yield reforming catalysts: Catalyst technologies have advanced over the past five years, improving aromatics selectivity and hydrogen production. These are easy to change out ‘on the fly’ and provide significant PX production improvements.Apr-2025
SPONSORS