Poland's Grupa Azoty to use C3 Oleflex™ technology to produce propylene

15-Jun-15

UOP LLC, a Honeywell company announced that its C3 Oleflex™ process technology will be used by Poland's Grupa Azoty to produce propylene. The facility will produce 400,000 metric tons annually of high-quality propylene. The new unit in Police, in the Szczecin region of Poland, is slated to come online in 2019. "In Western Europe, byproduct propylene is expected to decline about 4% over the next five years, while global propylene demand will increase by more than 20%, meaning on-purpose production is critical to fill the gap," said Mike Millard, vice president and general manager of Honeywell UOP's Process Technology and Equipment business. "This new facility helps position Poland as an important petrochemical producer with strong manufacturing capabilities that is creating new jobs in the region." Grupa Azoty, one of Europe's largest chemical companies, offers a diversified product portfolio, ranging from mineral fertilizers and engineering plastics to oxo-alcohols and pigments. "This new propylene production unit will be the largest project in our company's history and it will make a significant impact on the European petrochemical market, so it was important to select a reliable technology and an experienced company," said Krzysztof Jalosinski, president of Grupa Azoty's subsidiary in Police and vice-president of the Management Board of Grupa Azoty. "We chose Honeywell UOP Oleflex technology due to its economics, reliability and product quality, as well as the company's decades of experience with propylene projects worldwide." Propylene is a byproduct of certain refining processes. Many of those process units are closing in Europe or are being converted to other processes that produce less propylene byproduct. The resulting propylene shortage has sparked investment in technology to create on-purpose propylene from propane, which is either derived from natural gas or produced from petroleum refining. By 2020, 20% of the world's propylene production is expected to come from on-purpose propylene production technologies such as Honeywell UOP's Oleflex technology. For more than 20 years, Oleflex has been a leading technology worldwide for converting propane to propylene.