US plant builder ECI (Baton Rouge, Louisiana; www.ecigrouponline.com) said it is erecting two 200,000 t/y EVA plants in Qinzhou in China’s Guangxi Province with its technology and sales partner, the Spanish petrochemical giant Repsol (Madrid; www.repsol.com).

ECI did not name the client, but its identity should be quite clear: Guangxi Petrochemical, a unit of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC, Beijing; www.cnpc.com.cn/en), last year began erecting a petrochemical complex around a naphtha cracker with an ethylene capacity of 1.2 mn t/y at the site. The cracker is supplied from the neighbouring refinery in the northern part of the Qinzhou Port Industrial Zone.

The Petrochemical Refining and Chemical Integration Transformation and Upgrading project, priced at approximately EUR 4.5 bn (EUR 4.2 bn) is expected to start coming onstream in 2025 and includes downstream assets of 450,000 t/y for HDPE, an HD/LLDPE swing system with 500,000 t/y, two 300,000 t/y polypropylene lines, 300,000 t/y for aromatics extraction, 160,000 t/y for butadiene, and undisclosed capacity for hydrogenation with styrene extraction.

The two EVA lines were previously described as with capacities of 100,000 t/y and 200,000 t/y but have apparently been expanded to two lines with the latter.

Guangxi Huayi New Material had already commissioned a nearby propane dehydrogenation plant with C3 capacity of 750,000 t/y near the end of 2022.

Since 2021, ECI has also been building a 300,000 t/y LDPE/EVA swing plant for Shandong Yulong Petrochemical as part of a similarly large project in the northeast province of Shandong.