Mossi&Ghisolfi Group announced last Wednesday a Licensee Agreement with Alpek, the largest petrochemical company in Mexico and the second largest in Latin America, for IntegRex PTA, Purified terephthalic acid, technology. The technology will be used in the construction of M&G’s previously announced 1,200,000 MT per annum PTA plant at Corpus Christi, Texas. M&G also announced, Alpek purchased for a price of $350 million a multiyear sourcing agreement covering rights 400,000 MT of PET, Polyethylene terephthalate, (made with 336,000 MT of integrated PTA) per year.
M&G will fully own and independently construct and operate both the PET and PTA plants, will use the vast majority of the plants’ output – 600,000 MT of PET and 864,000 of PTA – to grow with its PET clients in North America and to captively source part of its other PTA requirements in North America. Both the PTA plant and M&G’s proprietary 1,000,000 MT per annum PET plant are expected to begin production in 2016.
IntegRex technology can produce PTA/PET resins with substantially less energy, water and raw materials, resulting in products with an environmental advantage. It makes efficient use of plant space, requiring less fossil fuel for construction and operation. It improves yield while essentially eliminating wastewater streams, compared with traditional processes. And resins made using IntegRex are 100% recyclable in the same stream as traditonal PET resins.
Marco Ghisolfi, Ceo of M&G, stated that “thanks to the unique and experienced world class engineering of Chemtex and Sinopec we will be the first to scale up IntegRex PTA technology to this level. It is through the combination of the up-scaled IntegRex PTA technology and the innovative M&G Easy-up PET Technology that we will be introducing at Corpus Christi the most efficient, state of art, PTA-PET plants in the Americas.” Other terms and conditions of the agreements were not disclosed.
M&G Group is a family owned chemical engineering and manufacturing group headquartered in Tortona, Italy. M&G Group operates in the PET resin industry in the Americas through its wholly-owned holding company, Mossi & Ghisolfi International S.A. (M&G International). M&G International is presently a leading producer of PET resin for packaging applications in the Americas, with a production capacity in 2012 of approximately 1.6 million tons per year. Thanks to its proprietary Easy-up PET Technology M&G International currently owns the world’s largest single line PET plants in Altamira, Mexico (single line of 490,000 MT/year nominal capacity) and Suape, Brazil (single line of 650,000 MT/year nominal capacity).



IL BIOECONOMISTA 