On April 22, 2020, China’s major national foreign-invested project, the ExxonMobil Huizhou Ethylene Project with a total investment of US$10 billion, started construction in the Daya Bay Petrochemical Zone in Huizhou, Guangdong. This is another major foreign-owned petrochemical project worth tens of billions of dollars in Guangdong, following the BASF fine chemical integration project in Zhanjiang Donghai Island.
ExxonMobil Huizhou, Guangdong Vinyl Project
The ExxonMobil Huizhou Ethylene Project in Guangdong is the first major petrochemical project wholly owned by an American company in China. It mainly constructs 1.6 million tons/ Ethylene and other installations. The ExxonMobil Huizhou ethylene project will be implemented in two phases. The first phase includes the construction of crude oil steam cracking, polyethylene, polypropylene and other process equipment as well as supporting public works. Phase II: 1.2 million tons/year ethylene equipment, polyethylene, polypropylene, butyl rubber and other process equipment and supporting public engineering equipment, storage and transportation packaging equipment, auxiliary production facilities and system engineering, etc. The total investment of the project is 65,067 million yuan, and the investment plan in 2020 is 1,360 million yuan. It mainly carries out reclamation projects and heavy dock foundation construction, and builds comprehensive service office buildings.
Learn more: New developments! ExxonMobil Huizhou Ethylene Project is fully promoting the smooth start of the project! Learn more: New large ethylene projects assembled in 2020! We will take you to review the progress of large ethylene projects such as ExxonMobil Huizhou and PetroChina Changqing, focusing on American companies, mutual benefit, optimization and upgrading of the petrochemical industry, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
In early December 2019, Woodlen went to Beijing. At that time, Han Zheng met him in Zhongnanhai. Han Zheng mentioned at the time that the long-term positive trend of China’s economy has not changed, with huge development potential and strong resilience, which will provide more market space and investment opportunities for foreign-funded enterprises. He said, “We welcome ExxonMobil to continue to expand investment in China and start construction of the Huizhou petrochemical complex project as soon as possible.” After more than four months, ExxonMobil’s Huizhou ethylene project in Guangdong has started construction.
This groundbreaking ceremony was of extremely high standard. In Beijing, Guangdong and the United States, they jointly attended the project opening ceremony in the “two countries and three places” through video connections.
Focus on project promotion
In recent times, project promotion has been a very important task, whether at the central or local level.
On March 26, Han Zheng attended the “Promoting the Construction of Major Projects and Actively Doing a Good Job Video and telephone conference on stabilizing investment work.” At that meeting, Han Zheng said that we should effectively solve the bottleneck constraints faced by promoting the construction of major projects and give full play to the key role of effective investment in stabilizing growth.
He requested that the resumption of construction of major investment projects “must be actively and orderly promoted” and “accelerate the return to normal construction progress.” Judging from the recent situation, various regions have focused their efforts on traditional infrastructure construction in the transportation field. Jiangsu and Zhejiang have taken the lead and released a blueprint for a strong transportation province. Zhejiang is about to launch a number of “super transportation projects” with a total investment of more than 3 trillion yuan. Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong and other places have included new infrastructure as a focus of digital economy construction and plan to increase investment in 5G, data centers and other fields.
Huizhou City’s growing petrochemical industry
November 1, 2002 CNOOC and Shell Nanhai Petrochemical Project laid the first stake on the shore of Daya Bay, announcing the official launch of the largest Sino-foreign joint venture project in the country at the time, and sounding the clarion call for Huizhou to enter the world’s petrochemical industry.
The ExxonMobil Huizhou ethylene project with a total investment of US$10 billion has broken ground, taking a key step towards building the Daya Bay Petrochemical Zone into a world-class green petrochemical industry base.
At present, 90 projects have been settled in the Daya Bay Petrochemical Zone, with a total investment of 215 billion yuan, of which nearly 90% are invested by the world’s top 500 and industry-leading companies. With a good industrial foundation and The complete supporting facilities have attracted internationally renowned chemical companies from more than 20 countries and regions around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan, including CNOOC, Shell, ExxonMobil, Bridgestone, Well-known brands such as LG Chem and Clariant.
In 2019, the total output value of Huizhou’s petrochemical industry reached 183.35 billion yuan, accounting for 1.4% of the total output value of the national petrochemical industry, ranking first in the country in the scale of refining and chemical integration. The advanced energy consumption levels of ethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene products are among the first in the world. At present, the petrochemical industry in Huizhou City has reached 22 million tons/year of oil refining and 2.2 million tons/year of ethylene. Huizhou has proposed to make great efforts to build the Daya Bay Petrochemical Zone into a world-class green industrial base, and build a trillion-level petrochemical energy new materials industry cluster by 2028. </p
