China’s C3 Industry Leads the World—Explore PDH’s Road to Rise up
Lead: In recent years, China’s petrochemical industry has developed rapidly. Relying on the multi-industry chain and diversified development trend of petrochemical, coal chemical and light ends cracking, China’s C3 industry chain has grown rapidly, especially that the proposed PDH projects are in large quantities. This article combs the development of the C3 industry chain and the PDH project in detail, analyzes the supply pattern and price of imported propane in depth, and predicts the stability and price advantage of imported propane in the medium and long term.
The C3 industry chain develops rapidly, and the downstream market is worth to studying.
In 2019, the global propylene capacity totaled around 135 million mt/a, with a compound growth rate of 3.8% in the past five years and showing a continuous and stable expansion trend. From the regional layout, Asian propylene capacity ranked first in the world, and China had the most concentrated propylene capacity in Asia. From 2015 to 2019, China’s propylene capacity rose continuously. In 2015, China’s propylene capacity totaled 28,350kt/a, and by 2019, the total capacity was 39,270kt/a, up 38.52%. In addition, as the world’s most important producer and marketer of propylene, China still needed to import propylene to supplement the demand from downstream derivatives based on huge internal supply.
Compared with the C2 industry chain, the C3 industry chain, which uses propylene as the feedstock, has more downstream derivatives and longer extension, which is more conducive to the development of high value-added products.
China’s propylene has wide downstream fields, and the demand growth is steady. In 2019, the total demand volume of propylene was about 37,290kt, up 9% Y-O-Y. The downstream derivatives are represented by PP, and other chemical downstream markets, including PO, NBA, acrylic acid, acrylonitrile, have newly added capacity in recent years, continuing to support the demand growth of propylene.
The production technology diversified, and PDH technology developed fast.
With the global production technology of olefins diversifying, the supply of propylene produced by traditional technologies declined, and PDH became the main technology for propylene capacity expansion. In the late 1980s, some steam crackers in Europe were closed, leading to a serious propylene shortage. The targeted production got attention after this incident, and the propane dehydrogenation technology (PDH) came into being. In the world, the first PDH unit was put into operation in Thailand in 1990. In China, the first PDH unit went into production at Tianjin Bohai Chemical Industry in October 2013. From 2014, the capacity of PDH unit expanded rapidly, and many enterprises such as Zhejiang Satellite Petrochemical and Ningbo Kingfa Advanced Materials successively put the PDH units into production.
