Advancement in Purified Terephthalic Acid facility by INEOS Aromatics in Indonesia

Aromatics Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA), plant based in Merak, Indonesia, recently spent 70 million dollars to advance its PTA plant. This upgradation by INEOS Aromatics will improve the PTA plant capacity and reduce the emission of CO2 gas, thus improving the PTA market and creating competitiveness amongst the downstream polyester industry. In India, the price for Purified Terephthalic Acid settled at INR 75700 per ton CFR JNPT on 8^th April.

Servomex helped install an instrumental oxygen analyzer at the Purified Terephthalic Acid plant of INEOS Aromatics, which includes installing two vent gas analyzer systems to reduce the CO2 gas emission with enhanced safety. Each gas analyzer system comes with a pressure reduction pre-sample conditioner enclosure and a servo tough OxyExact 2200, a high specification O2 analyzer.

This process air compressor will reduce the emission of CO2 by 15% and increase the plant capacity by 575,s000 tpy from previous capacity of 500000 tpy (throughput yield). The investment by the company improved the validity of the company, increasing the supply of the product in the overseas market, which will enhance the product's availability in the Indonesian market. Therefore, increasing the domestic consumption of the product by end-use industries.

Purified Terephthalic Acid, the feedstock for Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles, which are widely used in the packaging industry, has always been in high demand in Asia-Pacific. PTA is a crude oil derivative used in the polyester industry. Hence, the ongoing epidemic situation in the Chinese market has hampered the demand-supply chain, affecting the requirements of other Asian countries for Purified Terephthalic Acid. Meanwhile, INEOS aromatics' modernization has increased their capacity by 15%. As a result, until China struggles with its reduced operating rate, the country can rely on Indonesia to meet its PTA requirement.

Furthermore, the Purified Terephthalic Acid unit of Chuanneng Chemical, with an annual output of 1 million tons, was shut down around April 7 for planned maintenance. The industry restarted on April 12 with 72% efficiency, but PTA is still in the maintenance cycle.

As per the ChemAnalyst analysis, " Seeing the current market dynamics for Purified Terephthalic Acid, Indonesia's advancement in their INEOS Aromatics PTA unit may help to improve the disrupted supply chain from China."