Investment costs of new petrochemicals hubs will increase due in large part to both the more complicated feedstock slate and to the diversity of downstream products, Jim Gallogly, CEO of LyondellBasell, said Wednesday at the sixth annual Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association forum in Dubai.
Gallogly estimated that the costs of new petrochemical complexes to be built between the years 2011 and 2025 to be between $5 billion and $20 billion for new complexes, up dramatically from around $1.5-5 billion between 1997 and 2010.
Part of the higher investment cost was because of the increasing size of the petrochemical complexes, in line with a shift to heavier feedstock and a move to more integrated refinery and petrochemicals complexes.
Gallogly noted that the scale of complexes would become bigger, with the plant size of a new PE plant to be at least 500,000 mt/year between 2011 and 2025, compared with 300,000 mt/year of new PE plants built in 1997-2010, and 100,000 mt/year capacity of PE plants before 1996.
