OREANDA-NEWS. July 17, 2008.  The project was launched at the Turkmenbashi oil refineries to increase the production capacity of Turkmenistan’s leading petrochemical enterprise and to broaden the range of domestically manufactured polypropylene products. Under the contract concluded with the Turkmenbashi oil refineries the DMT Company (France) – the winner of the international tender, who offered the effective and efficient polypropylene production technology based on the latest innovations, is to build the unit producing biaxial polypropylene fabric (BOPP) in the littoral region.

The priorities of the petrochemical industry development strategy stipulates for constructing the large-scale polypropylene production units and enterprises manufacturing a broad range of polypropylene products for the domestic and foreign consumer markets. The large-scale activity began with putting the millisecond catalytic cracking (MSCC) unit producing liquefied gas used for manufacturing polypropylene into operation at the Turkmenbashi oil refineries. The first polypropylene complex in the country was built there. The project capacity of the plant constructed by the consortium of the Japanese companies – JGC, Itochu, Nissho Ivai, Marubeni is 90,000 tons a year.

The new project implemented in collaboration with the DMT Company will be an important step towards completing the processing chain. Granular polypropylene is of great demand on the world markets and the products from this polymer cost even more. That became a key factor for taking the decision on construction of the plant amounted to over 40 million euro.

The estimated capacity of the technological line is over 20,000 tons a year. The spectrum of products is quite broad. As a packing material BOPP is widely used in agriculture and food industry. Thus, construction of the BOPP unit is of paramount importance for the local enterprises producing the consumer goods. Moreover, littoral petrochemical industry workers will manufacture the products, which are of high demand on the domestic and foreign markets.

Thus, the course towards reconstructing and modernizing the Turkmenbashi oil refineries turned out to be optimally designed to achieve the goals of the economic development strategy of Turkmenistan – a country with the largest hydrocarbon reserves in the world. Nowadays, the work is aimed at increasing performance reliability of the correlated processing units and applying innovative petrochemical production technologies. Thus, construction of the AT-7 unit with the estimated capacity of 3 million tons a year is in active preparation. The project on construction of the complex of the delayed fuel carbonization units implemented in collaboration with the Lotus Company (Turkey) amounts to over 200 million euro. The project turned into a technical revolution in production of Turkmen coke, which is highly demanded on the domestic and foreign markets and used in iron-and-steel and non-ferrous electrometallurgy for melting steel, producing aluminum and aluminum alloys.