Turkey, Qatar to Develop Gas-Petchem Plant
Turkey's MetCap Energy Investments and Qatar's Fusion Dynamics have announced plans to develop a fully integrated LNG import and gas-to-petrochemicals plant at Enez on Turkey's European Aegean coast. Project Pearl was unveiled at a press conference April 9 in Istanbul.
The $4bn plant will be designed to operate either with gas from an LNG terminal to be built as part of the project, or pipeline gas from the Turkey-Greece interconnector which passes 60 km to the north of where the plant will be.
The petrochemical plant will have an annual capacity of 2.1bn m³ of natural gas which can be converted to 2.6bn m³ of methanol to be used as feedstock for producing 2.6bn m³ of light olefins – propylene and ethylene – which can then be converted to polyethylene and polypropylene.
Operating at full capacity the plant will be able to produce 590,000 metric tons (mt)/yr of mixed polypropylenes and 400,000 mt/yr of mixed polyethylenes. The plant will also be able to import propylene and ethylene for use directly as feedstock as a means of offsetting fluctuations in gas prices.
The plant will be supplied with power from a planned 785-MW gas-fired power plant being developed separately by a MetCap subsidiary at a site to the north of the planned plant, with power to be transited to the plant via currently redundant power transmission lines.
According to announcements by MetCap, 30% of funding for the project will come from the two equity partners with the remaining 70% to be sourced from commercial lenders.
No information has been given on where gas will be sourced from, beyond the suggestion that both piped gas and LNG will be used and the implication that with a Qatari co-owner the plant may mean that LNG could be sourced at a discount from Qatar. Turkey already imports substantial quantities of LNG from Qatar at its two land terminals and two newly installed floating storage and regasification units.
Similarly no information has been given on whether the estimated cost of the project includes the construction of a connection from the existing Turkey-Greece pipeline to the site of the planned plant or whether the developers will expect Botas, which operates the line, to develop that itself.
In either event, with a nominal maximum capacity of 11bn m³/yr that is now transiting only up to 0.75bn m³/yr of Azeri gas to Greece, Botas has plenty of spare capacity to utilise, the more so given that its export contract to Greece ends in 2021 and is not guaranteed to be renewed.
As yet no confirmation has been given as to when the partners plan for the plant to start production. But the Turkish manufacturing sector is a major consumer of imported plastics so finding a market for the plant's output is unlikely to be a problem. In 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available, Turkey used 2.2mn mt of polypropylene, compared with local production capacity of only 136,000 mt with polyethylene consumption of 2.14mn mt, against local capacity of 38,000 mt.