The Ineos group (Rolle / Switzerland; www.ineos.com) is moving to beef up its presence in the Chinese styrenics sector, not quite a year after concluding the purchase of two production sites from Total (Paris / France; www.total.com) in February 2019 – see Plasteurope.com of 22.02.2019. Subsidiary Ineos Styrolution (Frankfurt / Germany; www.ineos-styrolution.com) has now announced it will build a greenfield 600,000 t/y ABS plant adjacent to one of the sites acquired from the French group, at Ningbo in Zhejiang province. With the rapid expansion, the company said it is embarking on plans to grow its production capacity in China “significantly.” Output is bound for the domestic market.

Construction is planned to begin later in 2020, and the new facility is due to go onstream in 2023. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news a day prior to the Ineos announcement, it will cost USD 800m. Both the Ningbo polystyrene plant and its sister plant at Fonshan, Guangdong, can produce 200,000 t/y of the commodity plastic.

Ineos said the Ningbo ABS project – which it will wholly own – is part of a wider strategic cooperation framework agreement it signed with the Ningbo municipal government on 9 January 2020. Without revealing details, it added that the pact “will help facilitate mutual benefit between Ineos and Ningbo city.” According to Plasteurope.com’s Polyglobe database (www.polyglobe.net), the town in Zhejiang is one of the largest production sites for ABS.

China is the world’s biggest market for ABS as well as its largest producer. The investment at Ningbo will give the styrenics specialist a chance to compete directly with locally produced ABS grades, said Steve Harrington, president Global Styrene Monomer and Asia-Pacific at Ineos Styrolution. With production shifting consistently eastward over the past decades, the ABS market is now concentrated heavily in Asia. Among the major Western players, the Ineos offshoot and Trinseo (Berwyn, Pennsylvania / USA; www.trinseo.com) have production facilities in Europe and North America in addition to Asia.