Media: Korea's Hanwha Total to expand and upgrade Daesan cracker

According to media reports, South Korea’s Hanwha Total Petrochemical will invest USD450 million to upgrade its naphtha cracker and boost ethylene output by 30 per cent from the current capacity to 1.4 million tons per year. The project is expected to complete by mid 2019.

Up-on completion, the cracker would have full flexibility to process propane feedstock besides naphtha. This is one of the company’s strategies to boost margins by leveraging the widely available at competitive prices propane gas. The additional ethylene output will meet the fast growing domestic market and also China demand, the report said.

At the moment, the Deasan cracker runs solely on naphtha feeds and is able to produce 1.1 million tons/year of ethylene and 860,000 tons/year of propylene.

In another news, Hanwha Total Petrochemical is also on track to complete its No. 3 styrene monomer (SM) line by 2018. The line is designed to produce 600,000 tons/year of SM. Its existing two SM lines accounted for annual capacity of 1.05 million tons/year. With this expansion, Hanwha Total Petrochemical becomes the largest SM producer in Asia with total nameplate capacity of more than 1.6 million tons/year.