Page 7 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine May 2024

bne May 2024 Companies & Markets I 7
Uzbekistan MTO: plastics in the steppe
Ben Aris in Bukhara
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is a man with a mission: to add value to everything he can. Uzbekistan is emerging from its hermit status under the previous president, Islam Karimov, who died in 2016, and since then Mirziyoyev has implemented one reform after another,
where the goal has been to make better use of the country’s resources and move the country up the value chain to create better paid jobs for the burgeoning young population.
The most obvious example is the cotton crop, which has tradition- ally been the country’s bread and butter. A major foreign exchange earner for two decades since the country’s independence in 1991, Mirziyoyev radically banned the export of raw cotton and then privatised the entire sector in 2021, forcing the owners to invest into new machines and move up the value chain to make textiles and thread amongst other things.
Now Mirziyoyev is at it again: Uzbekistan has launched
the construction of a petrochemical plant from scratch to supply the country with over a million tonnes per year (tpy) of plastic.
The Gas Chemical Complex MTO (methanol to olefin) Central Asia Karakul Complex is a petrochemical complex being built near the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara and is a showcase of the “New Uzbekistan” transformation.
The plant will transform methane into methanol and use that as the feedstock to make ethylene, propylene and various polymers (PP, PET, EVA, LDPE and HDPE) that when at full production is expected to make 1.1mn tpy of plastics. The facility will be unique in Central Asia and supply regional markets as well as Uzbekistan’s own domestic market.
The country produces about 30bn cubic metres of gas a year – not quite enough to power its own economy – but it currently imports all its plastics.
The project started in 2019 when the government studied the country’s needs and looked at a total of 47 different types of plastics before settling on five that it intends to make itself, using its own gas production as a feedstock from the Mubarak
Uzbekistan has embarked on an ambitious project to build a petrochemical complex from scratch near the ancient Silk Road town of Bukhara to supply itself with plastics. / bne IntelliNews
gas fields. The GCC MTO was formally created by presidential decree in August 2021.
Uzbekistan has the advantage that its gas is very lean, insomuch that it doesn’t contain much contamination from longer carbon chains and so is ideal for conversion into methanol, the basic feedstock for MTO.
In addition, ArkChemical is a joint venture between Saneg and the state-owned energy champion, Uzbekneftegaz, that will add a naphtha cracker unit to the complex that uses synthetic naphtha as a feedstock to produce polymers. ArkChemical’s investment cost is an estimated $1.1bn
and will process some 430,000 tpy of naphtha to produce
MTO main products
Name
Production volume
Use
Domestic/ export share
Low density polyethylene terephthalate (LDPE)
Ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA)
80,000
tonnes per year
100,000 tonnes per year
350,000 tonnes per year
For pipes
Used in footwear, sports, and leisure applications
50% sold domestically
40% will be sold domesti- cally with the rest for export
60% will be sold domestically
High density polyethylene terephthalate (HDPE
280,000 tonnes per year
Used in automotive industry for things like bumpers
18% will be sold on the domestic market
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)
300,000 tonnes per year
The most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family and is used in fibres for clothing, containers for liquids and foods, and thermoforming for manufacturing, and in combination with glass fibre for engineering resins.
100% domestic
Polypropylene (PP)
Source: MTO
A robust heat-resistant plastic
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