Air Liquide Engineering and Construction, the plant contracting arm of the French industrial gases group, will handle overall engineering, procurement and construction services as well as providing BASF’s NMP butadiene extraction technology under license.

The new Polish BD unit, the first for Synthos at Plock, will triple output capability for the chemical at the site, where around 50,000 t/y is already produced downstream of the PKN Orlen cracker. The company based at Oswiecim, Poland, plans to use the additional output volume mainly to feed its styrene-butadiene-rubber (SBR) plant and a 50,000 t/y polystyrene plant at its headquarters site 350 km to the south.

In May of this year, Synthos inked a deal with Trinseo to acquire the US styrenics and rubber producer’s Schkopau, Germany-based synthetic rubber business for $491 million. The transaction, which is set to close late this year or early next year, encompasses the East German assets bought by Dow Chemical in the mid-1990s from the German state-owned Treuhandanstalt, the agency that wound up the production assets of the former German Democratic Republic.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist