INEOS has declared plans to ramp up the ethylene capacity of its cracker facilities at Grangemouth to more than one million tonnes.
The investment, which is part of a €2 billion expansion programme across the petrochemical giant’s European sites, is expected to bring a further 150 jobs to the sprawling petrochemical site. Ineos currently employs 1,350 staff at Grangemouth.
The pan-European expansion includes plans to build a propane dehydrogenation plant in Antwerp, which will produce 750,000 tonnes of propylene for Ineos units across Europe.
Swiss-based Ineos, owned by billionaire industrialist Jim Ratcliffe, is also scaling up its cracker facility in Rafnes, Norway, giving it a similar capacity to Grangemouth. The expansions will add up to 900,000 tonnes of ethylene to its overall capacity
Mr Ratcliffe said: “These projects represent the first substantial investments in the European chemicals industry for many years. It has only been made possible because of Ineos’s massive $2bn investment in our Dragon Ships programme, which allows us to import ethane and LPG from the US in huge quantities”.
The investment at Grangemouth comes nearly a year after Ineos put in £450 million in an ethane terminal at the site, allowing it to import liquid ethane from the US and process it into ethylene and polyethylene.
It comes shortly after Ineos completed a £1bn deal to acquire the North Sea oil and gas portfolio of Denmark’s Dong Energy, which followed its $250m acquisition of the Forties North Sea oil and gas pipeline from BP.
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