The new “Borouge 3" cracker is set to deliver its first batch of commercial ethylene in the UAE by the end of May, according to Mark Garrett, CEO at Borealis (Vienna / Austria; www.borealisgroup.com). The financial news agency “Bloomberg” reports the Austrian polyolefin giant’s jv with Abu Dhabi National Oil (Adnoc, Abu Dhabi / UAE; www.adnoc.com) has been in a pre-commissioning phase the last eight weeks and is now ready to begin what management planned for it back in 2009, when the UAE expansion project got underway.

The cracker of the USD 4 bn plant expansion at Borouge (Abu Dhabi /UAE; www.borouge.com) in the western port city of Ruwais has an ethylene capacity of 1.5m t/y according to Plasteurope.com database Polyglobe (www.polyglobe.net). Downstream facilities are to produce 540,000 t/y of HDPE and 350,000 t/y f LLDPE. In addition, an 80,000 t/y line of XLPE is also planned along with two facilities producing a total of 960,000 t/y of PP. The propylene necessary for the site is won from an olefin conversion unit, which transforms C2 into C3. As with the other two existing Borouge plants, the material produced at the new site is targeted for use in Asian markets, especially China – see Plasteurope.com of 22.04.2014.

Bloomberg reports annual capacity at Borouge will now more than double to 4.5m t/y of ethylene and the derivative polypropylene and polyethylene.

Meanwhile, the HDPE line at the Borealis site in Burghausen / Germany, which has been producing 175,000 t/y, is still on schedule to be shuttered this year – see Plasteurope.com of 16.07.2013. In response to a Plasteurope.com query, the company said the Bavarian facility will not be re-started after a scheduled maintenance in October and will be officially mothballed by the end of 2014.