News Post
BP Cooper River PTA plant unveils upgrades
As part of a $200 million program, BP has completed the upgrade of its petrochemical facility off of the Cooper River in Berkeley County that will significantly reduce the site’s energy use and emissions, and allow it to produce a new line of low-carbon products for the first time in the United States.
With the modernization project, the site will be able to reduce electricity use by 40 percent and cut carbon emissions by about 109,000 tons per year — equivalent to eliminating the electricity and heating emissions of about 2,000 typical U.S. households — while also boosting production by 10 percent.
The improvements also will allow BP to produce PTAirTM – a new low-carbon brand of purified terephthalic acid, a raw material used to make polyester, as well as PTAirTM Neutral, the world’s first certified carbon-neutral PTA, which will use offsets like reforestation projects to help customers meet net zero-carbon targets. BP introduced both products in Europe in 2016 and now is bringing them to the U.S.
“This project is a major step forward for the Cooper River facility, making it one of the most efficient, environmentally conscious and cost-competitive in the industry, while also enabling it to produce one of the lowest-carbon products of its kind,1” said Luis Sierra, BP’s CEO, Global Aromatics. “We know that today’s ultra-competitive U.S. petrochemicals industry demands a relentless focus on innovation, safety and the environment – and at Cooper River and across the globe, we are rising to the challenge.”
The last milestone of the project, which created about local 400 construction jobs over more than two years, came with the recent start-up of a new state-of-the-art oxidation reactor, the largest in the U.S. The reactor is an important unit in the processing of PTA, which is found in a wide range of consumer goods, from fabrics to food and beverage containers.
BP’s global petrochemicals strategy is focused on pursuing a competitively advantaged portfolio through world-scale, low-cost facilities that use BP proprietary technology. In support of this strategy, BP invested to upgrade its Cooper River plant and a sister facility in Geel, Belgium, the largest two PTA-producing sites in the Americas and Europe, respectively. In 2015, BP also started up the Zhuhai 3 unit in Guangdong Province, China – the world’s largest single-train PTA production unit and one of the largest, most efficient PTA production units in the world.
http://www.berkeleyind.com/news/berkeley-co-petrochemical-plant-unveils-upgrades/article_6a758890-51e5-11e7-a9d5-17710b598cea.html
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