It’s been nine years since Formosa Petrochemical filed its first permit applications for a proposed $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in Louisiana and, while the greenfield project has faced legal setbacks, it recently posted an important win and may — emphasis on may — eventually make it across the finish line. The Sunshine Project would be massive and consequential, with two steam crackers each capable of consuming 75 Mb/d of ethane, a big propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit and a number of other petchem production facilities that together would employ more than 1,200. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the project and its long and winding road toward potential construction and startup.
Formosa Petrochemical Corp., an affiliate of Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, announced plans for the Sunshine Project in Louisiana’s St. James Parish back in April 2018, with the hope of starting construction at the 2,400-acre site on the west bank of the Mississippi River the following year. (As we’ll get to in a moment, that timeline turned out to be optimistic.) The plan is massive and far-reaching: a soup-to-nuts petchem complex that would be built in two phases over eight to 10 years. As shown in Figure 1 below, Phase I would involve: a 1.2 million metric-ton-per-year (MT/year), ethane-only steam cracker, a 400,000 MT/year linear-low density polyethylene (LDPE) plant, a similarly sized high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plant, and a 900,000 MT/year ethylene glycol plant, as well as a 600,000 MT/year PDH unit and a 600,000 MT/year polypropylene facility. Phase II would include a second 1.2 million MT/year ethane cracker, 400,000 MT/year LDPE plant, 400,000 MT/year HDPE plant, and 900,000 MT/year ethylene glycol plant. The support units include two utility facilities, one with boilers to produce steam and a second with combustion turbines to burn natural gas for electricity. A wastewater treatment plant and a logistics facility with storage and loading on trucks, railcars, barges and ships would round out the complex.
Figure 1. Plans for Phases 1 and 2 of the Sunshine Project. Source: Formosa Petrochemical
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