German specialty chemicals producer Lanxess will invest EUR 25m in its Lillo complex in Antwerp, Belgium’s harbor during 2017. The company said most of the money will be spent on improving the efficiency of its polyamide chain, which CEO Matthias Zachert said is the “backbone” of the company’s global high-tech plastics business. “Given the trend toward lightweight construction in the automotive industry, this is a major future market,” he commented.

No details of what measures are planned at the integrated complex inaugurated by Bayer in 1967 were provided. Zachert said Lanxess has invested more than EUR 300 million in Lillo since the company was founded as a spin-off from the Leverkusen group in 2004,”a sum that shows our firm commitment to this site.” In the meantime, the company now based at Cologne, Germany, has expanded and modernized operations. One of the latest step was implementation of a virtually energy self-sufficient infrastructure.

In recent years, Zachert said, Lanxess has focused on “building a balanced value chain” for its high-tech plastics production operations, which focus on polyamide (PA) and polybutylene terephthalate (PBT). The Lillo site is back-integrated into caprolactam, most of which is produced for captive use.

A milestone along Lanxess’s path to building up its plastics business following the split from Bayer, was the construction in 2014 of a PA polymerization plant with an annual capacity of 90,000 t/y, connected directly to the caprolactam production facility. From Antwerp harbor, the polymer is shipped to the company’s global network of compounding facilities.

The announcement of the new investment was made during a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of caprolactam production at the Belgian site, now Europe’s largest integrated chemical cluster. When initially started up by Bayer, the production complex had a caprolactam capacity of 160,000 t/y. Output capability now totals 220,000 t/y.