PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, is a thermoplastic polymer resin used in the production of various personal care packaging, and PTA, purified terephthalic acid, is the primary raw material used in the production of PET.
The new plants will be located in the Southern US and final candidates for selection have been reduced to sites in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
M&G says that a final selection of the location and of the PTA technology is expected to be announced by the end of June and construction time for both plants is estimated to be 30 months.
"The technological breakthrough of scaling up M&G's proprietary technology to a one million metric ton single reactor has been available to us since the year 2007 when our investment plans were delayed by the financial crisis," said Marco Ghisolfi, CEO of M&G's Polymers Business Unit.
"As a result of demand growth fully recovering in 2010 and of several plants in North America having closed or been sold over the past few years, the industry supply/demand balance has now been restored, creating room in the market for our new plant.”
Time to leverage proprietary technology
The packaging firm believes that North American assets must be competitive in the global environment so it has decided to follow through with its original plan of leveraging its proprietary PET technology and to enhance the plan implementation with the additional benefits of upstream integration now being offered by the latest generation PTA technologies.
"Our PET technology, which allows us to build plants over four times larger than those achievable with commercially available technologies, can today be combined with PTA plants with matching sizes and efficiency,” added Ghisolfi.
“This formidable combination, and the flexibility of its assets, will enable M&G to cost effectively service future industry growth and to have by far the most competitive cost base not only in the Americas but globally," he said.
According to M&G, the new PET single line plant will have a capacity of 1,000kt/year (approximately 2.2 billion lbs/year) and will employ, on a larger scale, the same technology as M&G's single reactor PET plant in Brazil which was opened in 2007.
The PTA unit will have a capacity of 1,200kt/year (approximately 2.6 billion lbs/year), and will provide full upstream integration for all of M&G's US PET capacity.