Hanwha Total Petrochemical, a 50/50 joint venture between Total and Hanwha, will invest nearly USD 500M to further expand its Daesan integrated refining and petrochemical complex in South Korea. The planned investment will increase polypropylene capacity by close to 60% to 1.1 MT per year by the end of 2020.The ethylene capacity will simultaneously increase by 10% to 1.5 MT.
This project complements the ongoing investments totalling USD 750M to increase the complex’s ethylene production capacity by 30% to 1.4 MT per year by mid-2019 and to expand polyethylene production capacity by 50% to 1.1 MT by end-2019. All these investments are designed to take advantage of competitively priced propane feedstock, which is abundantly available due to the shale gas revolution in the United States.With this new investment, Daesan will be in a position to capture margins across the propylene-polypropylene value chain, as it already does in the ethylene-polyethylene value chain.