ExxonMobil has outlined an aggressive growth strategy to more than double earnings and cash from operations by 2025. The program includes steps to increase earnings to $31 billion by 2025 (at 2017 prices) from last year’s adjusted profit of $15 billion, which excluded the impact of US tax reform and impairments.

“We’ve got the best portfolio of high-quality, high-return investment opportunities that we’ve seen in two decades,” Darren Woods, chairman and CEO, told investment analysts during the company’s annual meeting at the New York Stock Exchange.

Woods said the plan projects double-digit rates of return in all three of ExxonMobil’s businesses – upstream, downstream and chemicals. In its chemicals business, ExxonMobil expects to expand manufacturing capacity in North America and Asia-Pacific by about 40% in order to meet rising demand in Asia and other growing markets.

This will be partly achieved by adding 13 new facilities, including two steam crackers in the US. ExxonMobil announced that its new 1.5 million t/y ethane cracker in Baytown, Texas, USA, was mechanically complete with start-up due during the second quarter.

In a separate project, ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia’s SABIC plan to build a jointly owned petrochemical complex in San Patricio County, Texas, centered on a 1.8 million t/y ethane  cracker that would feed plants for monoethylene glycol and PE.

The company has also started engineering work on a potential US Gulf Coast project to expand PP production by up to 450,000 t/y. A final decision on the investment, which is anticipated to be several hundred million dollars, is expected later this year, with start-up possibly as early as 2021.

ExxonMobil said the plant will produce advanced PP products that can be used in high-performance automotive, appliance and packaging applications with output focused on supplying emerging markets, including Asia.