China's Fujian Billion starts up Quanzhou PTA unit.

Petrotahlil - Chinese polyester producer Fujian Billion is starting up its new 2.5mn t/yr purified terephthalic acid (PTA) unit at Quanzhou in southeast China's Fujian province.

Feedstock paraxylene was fed into one of the unit's two production trains today, while the second train will start up in early February. Fujian Billion targets to have on-specification production within a few days.

The PTA unit is located in the Quangang district of Quanzhou city, 50km northeast of Fujian Billion's existing polyester production base in Fujian. Construction started in March 2019 with an initial completion target of August 2020. But disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the completion by two to three months.

Fujian Billion reached an agreement with US-based Invista Performance Technologies in 2018 to use its P8 PTA processing technology at the new unit. The project's total investment cost is 5.7bn yuan ($882mn).

Fujian Billion is the largest polyester producer in south China and owns 1.85mn t/yr of continuous polymerization capacity in Quanzhou and 500,000 t/yr of polyester capacity in Vietnam. The start-up of its latest PTA unit will make Fujian Billion the seventh private-sector polyester producer with an integrated PTA facility in China.

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