Plans to build PET, PTA plants expected to create U.S. manufacturing jobs

The M&G Group announced plans to build a PET plant in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. This manufacturing facility will be co-located and fully integrated with a new purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant at the same site, creating approximately 250 jobs, with an additional 700 indirect positions and 3,000 jobs during construction.

The thermoplastic polymer resin PET is widely known as a packaging material for products such as soft drinks, pharmaceuticals, fresh and frozen foods and personal care products. PTA is the primary raw material used in the production of PET.

The new PET single line plant will have a capacity of 1 million metric tonnes/year (or approximately 2.2 billion lbs/year) and will employ, on a larger scale, the same technology (including M&G's revolutionary EasyUp SSP technology) as M&G's single reactor Suape (Brazil) PET plant which came on stream in Q1 2007 and has since been successfully debottlenecked to 650 kt/year.

The PTA unit will have a capacity of 1.2 million tonnes/year (or approximately 2.6 billion lbs/year), and will provide full upstream integration for all of M&G's U.S. PET capacity. Two technologies, among the very few capable of delivering the required size, are at the final evaluation stage for this PTA plant, which will be the largest in the Americas and among the largest in the world.

The new plants will be located in the Southern U.S. and final candidates for selection have been reduced to sites in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. A final selection of the location and of the PTA technology is expected to be announced by the end of June and construction time for both plants is estimated to be 30 months.

"As a result of demand growth fully recovering in 2010 and of several plants in North America having closed or been sold over the past few years, the industry supply/demand balance has now been restored, creating room in the market for our new plant," says Marco Ghisolfi, CEO of M&G's Polymers Business Unit. "The technological breakthrough of scaling up M&G's proprietary technology to a 1 million metric tonne single reactor has been available to us since the year 2007 when our investment plans were delayed by the financial crisis."

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