The South Korean company LG Chem believes the global petrochemical market to be stable for this year, and is diversifying its products to guard against falling plastic usage, the company’s chief executive said.
Asian petrochemical makers typically use crude-oil derived naphtha as a feedstock to produce ethylene and other basic petrochemicals, which are mostly used to make plastics. “The petrochemical business is largely affected by oil prices, but now oil prices are stable in the range of $60 per barrel after rising for a while,” Park Jin-soo, LG Chem CEO and vice president, said at a press conference on Friday which was embargoed until Sunday. LG Chem currently operates two naphtha crackers in the southwestern cities of Yeosu and Daesan with a combined 2.2 million tonnes per year (tpy) of ethylene output. It would increase the Daesan plant’s ethylene output capacity by 230,000 tonnes to 1.27 million tpy by 2019.
