Chemical Week • March 25/April 1 • New construction

EcoPro Group (Cheongju, South Korea) has announced an investment of 1.2 trillion South Korean won ($893.3 million) to expand battery materials production at its Pohang, South Korea, site. The company will invest 690 billion won to expand precursor capacity, 320 billion won to expand cathode materials capacity, 160 billion won in lithium hydroxide plants and 10 billion won in industrial gases production.

Through the investment, EcoPro plans to complete construction of EcoPro EM’s high-nickel-based nickel, cobalt and aluminum (NCA) production plant CAM8 and EcoPro Innovation’s lithium hydroxide production plant LHM2 in the first half of this year.

The plants will form part of the Pohang 4 Campus. Once completed, the campus will grow into a large-scale secondary battery industrial complex producing 270,000 metric tons per year of cathode materials, 110,000 metric tons per year of precursors and 26,000 metric tons per year of lithium hydroxide. The 270,000 metric tons of cathode materials made annually at Pohang will be enough to produce about 3 million electric vehicles, said the company.

The Pohang complex, which EcoPro began building in 2020, consists of four sites, and the total investment in the complex, including this year’s figure, amounts to 5.5 trillion won. The company last December bagged a contract with Samsung SDI to supply high-nickel-based NCA anode material from 2024 until 2028. The supply contract is worth 43.8 trillion won.

BASF SE has broken ground on a methyl glycols (MG) plant at the large-scale complex the company is developing at Zhanjiang, China. The MG facility will have a capacity of 46,000 metric tons per year and is aimed at meeting demand for brake fluids in the region. The plant is scheduled to commence operations by the end of 2025. “The new facility will be the only fully backward integrated MG plant into a steam cracker in China,” said Bir Darbar Mehta, senior vice president/petrochemicals, Asia-Pacific at BASF. The new plant will produce methyl diglycol (MDG), methyl triglycol (MTG) and methyl tetraglycol (MTEG) from methanol and purified ethylene oxide. MTG is the primary raw material to produce modern brake fluids used in the automotive industry, said BASF. The company recently opened a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) plant at Zhanjiang. It is the largest single TPU production line for BASF globally. BASF in 2022 opened a 60,000 metric tons per year engineering plastics compounding plant at Zhanjiang.

BASF SE announced it has broken ground on a new fermentation plant at Ludwigshafen, Germany, for biological and biotechnology-based crop protection products. The plant is expected to start operations in the second half of 2025 and will manufacture biological fungicides and biological seed treatment products, it said. BASF also plans to produce the main building block of an insecticide derived from a fungal strain at the facility, it added. The plant will employ 30 people in production, logistics, engineering and maintenance, BASF said. Plans for the plant were first announced in October last year, with the investment put by BASF in the “high double-digit million euro range.”

Sulzer Ltd. (Winterthur, Switzerland) will supply its polylactic acid (PLA) production technologies to Balrampur Chini Mills Ltd. (BCML; Kolkata, India) for a plant with a production capacity of 75,000 metric tons per year. Sulzer will deliver the manufacturing technologies for the key process stages, including lactide synthesis, lactide purification and polymerization. The $241.1 million facility will be located beside one of BCML’s existing sugar plants. BCML is one of India’s leading sugar producers, with a crushing capacity of 80,000 metric tons per day spread across 10 plants; it is already the largest producer of bioethanol for fuel in India and also uses waste products from the sugar mills for power generation.

Mining company Pilbara Minerals Ltd. (Perth, Australia) said it has signed a binding term sheet to complete a joint feasibility study on a downstream lithium conversion plant with Ganfeng Lithium Group Co. (Xinyu, China), one of the world’s largest lithium chemical converters. The feasibility study will consider a conversion plant that could produce 32,000 metric tons per year of lithium carbonate equivalent of lithium chemicals — hydroxide and/or carbonate — together with a potential intermediate lithium chemical product in Australia, leveraging Ganfeng’s experience as a lithium chemical converter, Pilbara said in a statement. The study is expected to be completed in the quarter ending March 31, 2025, with an option to progress to a final investment decision (FID) and formation of a joint venture (JV). It is not the first attempt by Pilbara Minerals to move into the lithium chemicals conversion business. The company made an FID in August 2023 for a demonstration plant within the Pilgangoora Operation JV in Western Australia with environmental technology developer Calix Ltd. (Sydney). But it is the first time Pilbara Minerals and Ganfeng Lithium have worked together on a downstream lithium conversion plant. When and where the project will be situated remain unknown, industry sources said.

IG Petrochemicals Ltd. (IGPL; Mumbai) has decided to establish a plasticizer plant at its Taloja, India, site. The production capacity of the plant will be 75,000 metric tons per year, and the estimated cost of the project is about 1.65 billion Indian rupees ($19.8 million). The plant will produce dibutyl phthalate, dioctyl phthalate and other plasticizers. The company also announced that its new phthalic anhydride (PA) plant with a capacity of 53,000 metric tons per year at Taloja has commenced production. The cost of that project was about $46.0 million. IGPL is India’s largest producer of PA. According to the company’s website, it currently operates 222,110 metric tons per year of PA capacity.