South Korean petrochemical company KP Chemical Corp. has formed a joint venture with the Russian AK Bars Bank to build a 660 million-pound- per-year bottle-grade PET production plant in Russia's Tatarstan republic.
The $147 million project, earmarked for the republic's Alabuga special economic zone, will be undertaken with technological assistance from Tatarstan's leading petrochemical company, JSC Tatneft-Neftekhim.
The Tatarstan government has said it considers the new PET plant a high-priority project. However, the joint venture company, KP Bars Holdings BV, has given no details about its timetable for construction and startup.
Seoul-based KP Chemical, which operates a major production complex at Ulsan, South Korea, has capacity to produce as much as 2.1 billion pounds of PET raw material purified terephthalic acid and 983 million pounds of PET resin.
KP Bars Holdings will compete with another joint venture in the country, Polief JSC, which has announced plans to expand its PET resin capacity to 1.3 billion pounds per year by 2011. Polief, which runs a petrochemicals complex at Blagoveschensk, Russia, has said it intends to raise PTA capacity to 882 million pounds per year.
Polief is a joint venture with shareholders including Moscow-based JSC Sibur Holding and CJSC Lukoil-Neftekhim, part of the Lukoil Oil Co., also in Moscow.