PX Production Capacity Keeps Growing
As of August 2021, China’s total PX capacity read 28.83 million tones, and the self-sufficiency rate had increased significantly. Meanwhile, the competition between domestic PX and imported PX has intensified resulted by the sharp rise of domestic output.
In recent five years, China’s PX production capacity and output were on the rise on the whole, with the industry run rate in the range of 65%-75%. However, there are still some factors restricting the PX output. First, the distribution of PX plants is uneven. Taking PetroChina Urumqi Petrochemical as an example: it has a PX production capacity of 1000 kt/a, but its supported PTA production capacity is only 90 kt/a. This means it will take a high delivery cost to transport its additional PX to East China or Southwest China. Second, the units are overhauled every two or four years, which to some extent affects the PX output. Third, the competition between imported resources and domestic supply is intensive due to cheap import cost. It was a turning point in 2019 when 4,500 kt/ a unit at Hengli Petrochemical and 4000 kt/a unit at Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical were put into operation in succession. The effective output of the two alone almost caught up with the total output in 2016, and the average annual output growth jumped to 16.77% in 2019.
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