According to statements made earlier today by Honeywell Company UOP LLC (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.uop.com), Viva Methanol Ltd., a Nigerian subsidiary of Eurochem Corp. Pte. Ltd. (Singapore; www.eurochem-corp.com), has selected the UOP/Hydro MTO and Total Petrochemicals/UOP Olefin Cracking process technologies to produce light olefins. The light olefins — 1.3-million m.t. of ethylene and propylene annually — will be derived from natural gas-generated methanol for the later production of high-value polyethylene and polypropylene. At 10,000 metric tons of methanol produced per day, the facility will be "the largest methanol production facility in the world" Viva Methanol chairman Mr Mohan K. Vaswani stated. It will also be the first commercial-scale tandem installation of the MTO process and Olefin Cracking process technologies.
Nigeria’s abundant natural gas resources are the tenth-largest proven reserves, accordng to the World Bank, and a byproduct of the region’s oil industry that has been largely squandered by conventional gas-flaring methods until recent political and economic pressure. Gas flaring contributes approximately 390-million tons of carbon dioxide annually according to research released last year by the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. Currently, Nigeria follows Russia as the world’s second largest gas-flaring country.
The MTO process, jointly developed by UOP and Norsk Hydro ASA (Oslo, Norway; www.hydro.com), converts methanol to ethylene and propylene using a proprietary UOP catalysts proven to provide higher yields with minimal byproducts. Designed for flexibility, the process allows producers to adjust the yield of each product to match shifting market demands. The Olefin Cracking process was developed by UOP and Total Petrochemicals (Brussels, Belgium; www.totalpetrochemicals.com) and integrated with the MTO process at the latter company’s site in Feluy, Belgium (CE, January 2006, p. 13). The current project is said to take advantage of the latest advances in methanol, methanol-to-olefins, and olefin cracking technologies to achieve higher yields, efficiencies and economies of scale.
UOP intends to supply the facility with basic engineering, catalysts, adsorbents, specialty equipment, and technical support as well as the technology licenses. The Nigeria plant, to be constructed in the country’s Lagos Free Trade Zone, is expected to come online in 2012.