Uhde awarded contract to build aromatics plant in China's Hebei Province

18-Dec-08

Risun Chemical Company of China has awarded a contract to Uhde to build an aromatics plant at Tangshan (Hebei Province), to produce top-quality benzene, toluene and xylene valuable aromatic fractions from coke oven light oil. The plant, which is designed for a throughput capacity of 200,000 tpa of coke oven light oil, is due to come on stream in 2010. The output from the plant, scheduled to start up in mid 2009, will cater to the growing demand of the domestic Chinese market. Xingtai Risun Coal & Chemical Company, a subsidiary of the Risun Group has already commenced construction of a 260,000 tpa capacity aromatics plant using Uhde's process. Together the two plants of Risun Group will have a production capacity of 260,000 tpa of high-purity aromatics. Uhde has won contracts for three more aromatics plant projects in China and one project each in Kazakhstan, South Korea and Qatar. Together, these plant contracts represent an annual production volume of more than 2 mln tpa of high-purity aromatics. Uhde's scope of services includes the licence, basic engineering and assistance with the commissioning and training of the operating personnel. Some of these contracts were won in cooperation with our French strategic technology partner AXENS. The aromatics plants will be based on Uhde's Morphylane® extractive distillation process which uses the specially developed solvent N-formylmorpholine to recover aromatics, such as benzene, toluene and xylene. In addition to achieving purities of more than 99.9 wt%, the Morphylane® process is also outstanding in its high yield and extremely low energy consumption.