South Korean industrial plant builder has joined an effort to build a multibillion-dollar petrochemical plant in eastern Ohio to take advantage of the region's oil-and-gas boom. The partnership between Seoul-based Daelim Industrial and Thailand's PTT Global Chemical can prove to be a "game-changer" for the proposed plant, which has idled in the planning stages for years. Daelim, according to its website, is South Korea's oldest construction company and an expert in petrochemical technology. The facility, commonly referred to as an ethane cracker, would convert ethane, a byproduct of natural gas drilling, into a hydrocarbon called ethylene that's further processed and used for plastics production and has other industrial uses. The new partnership's plans call for building a plant capable of producing 1.5 million metric tons (1.65 million tons) of ethylene a year, which would be a 50 percent increase in capacity over what PTT originally proposed.
