SIBUR to open center for piloting polymer production technology at cost of 6 bln rubles

MOSCOW. Aug 23 (Interfax) - Russian petrochemical group SIBUR is building a center for piloting base polymer production technologies in Tobolsk at a cost of more than 6 billion rubles, the company said.

SIBUR expects the new center to reduce the time it takes to get new products on the market by ten times.

"Previously all lab developments were sent for testing immediately to the production facility, but now we will be able to test them at a separate center, without taking the company's main production facilities out of commercial operation for this. Given that there are plans to annually test at least five catalysts and test the launch of about ten new brands of polymers in Tobolsk, the positive effect for processing sectors can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of additional tonnes of modern synthetic materials," SIBUR management board member and managing director for development and innovation Darya Borisova said.

The center will initially work on meeting the company's own needs, SIBUR said.

"The hardware configuration of the project provides the possibility to test more than 90% of the range of existing and prospective technologies for production of base polymers, which makes it one of a kind in the world," the company said.

The center will also test the company's solutions for production of catalysts, including chrome, titanium-magnesium and metallocene. In future, the center will also open additional possibilities for licensing these technologies, not just developing them.

The center will have design capacity of up to 300 tonnes per year. It will make it possible to test a broad range of brands of polyethylene and polypropylene, Russian production of which totals 5.3 million tonnes annually with potential to grow to 6 million tonnes by 2028, and do this in various regimes and configurations, SIBUR said.

The company has now completed installing the core process equipment at the center, more than 75% of which was made in Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Perm and Tambov). Construction is scheduled for completion by the end of September, which will be followed by pre-commissioning and comprehensive testing with production of trial products at the end of this year.

The center will become one of the projects aimed at self-sufficiency in special components, the guaranteed availability of which will be crucial for the production of up to 15 million tonnes of modern synthetic materials per year by 2030, SIBUR said.

The company also plans to open a center for researching and scaling technologies in Kazan by 2027 and is considering building a plant to produce catalysts in Tatarstan.