PETROCHINA Co, the nation's biggest oil company, last month started expanding an ethylene plant in northeastern China's Daqing city at a cost of 14 billion yuan (US$1.9 billion).
The company will double the plant's annual ethylene output to 1.2 million tons and add five supporting facilities, parent China National Petroleum Corp said in its online newsletter China Oil News yesterday, without giving a completion date.
China, which imports about half of the chemicals it needs, plans to more than triple the annual capacity of ethylene to 18.13 million tons by 2010.
PetroChina received state approval in June to expand the Daqing plant.
PetroChina will increase ethylene capacity to seven million tons a year by 2010 from 2.63 million tons last year, Liu Jie, deputy chief economic adviser at the company's chemicals and market unit, said on May 24.
It will build six ethylene projects in Daqing, Jilin, Fushun in the northeast, Lanzhou and Dushanzi in the northwest, and in Sichuan in the southwest, by 2010, Liu said.