Hengyi Industries is a 70:30 joint venture between China’s Zhejiang Hengyi Group and Damai Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brunei government’s Strategic Development Capital Fund. The company started up the first phase of a refinery and integrated petrochemical complex in November 2019, with plans for the second phase to include a cracker and plants producing aromatics such as benzene and paraxylene (PX), and purified terephthalic acid.

“The increased demand for paraxylene in Asia has led companies to invest in technologies for the conversion of crude oil to petrochemicals on a larger scale,” said Bryan Glover, vice president and general manager of the UOP Process Technologies business. He added that Hengyi Industries selected the UOP process to further expand its aromatics plant and meet the region’s growing demand for PX.

The Brunei complex will include an aromatics block consisting of UOP’s CCR Platforming technology to convert naphtha into aromatics and Light Desorbent Parex technology to recover and produce up to 2.3 million t/y of high-purity PX from mixed xylenes.

In addition, the complex will include a UOP naphtha hydrotreating unit, an olefin removal process unit, Sulfolane technology for aromatics extraction, Isomar technology to convert xylene isomers into more valuable PX, Tatoray technology to convert toluene and heavier aromatics into mixed xylenes, as well as high-purity benzene to more than double the PX yield from naphtha feedstock.

When the project is completed, Hengyi Industries will have capacity to produce more than 3.8 million t/y of PX. An on stream date for the complex has not been disclosed.

Author: Elaine Burridge, Freelance Journalist