Johnson Matthey and Eastman Chemical Company announce that their advanced, proprietary technology for the production of ethylene glycol from coal has been selected by Inner Mongolia Jiutai New Material for its planned 1,000,000 tonnes per annum ethylene glycol facility.
Ethylene glycol, commonly referred to as mono ethylene glycol (MEG), is a key industrial chemical and is also a building block in the production of polyesters for fiber and packaging applications. Today, the majority of the world’s MEG is produced from ethylene but this new process enables the production of MEG from a variety of raw materials, including coal, natural gas, or biomass, thereby enabling companies to produce MEG without the need to access ethylene.
Jiutai’s Coal to Chemicals complex will produce synthesis gas by gasification of coal. The synthesis gas will be converted to methanol which will then be converted to formaldehyde, from which MEG will be produced.
Johnson Matthey has also licensed to Jiutai its world leading technologies and catalysts for the production of methanol and formaldehyde in an integrated MEG facility, which will maximise feedstock conversion and reduce utility consumption across the multi-step route from syngas to MEG. This, combined with the advanced technology for MEG production and the large capacity, provides significant value addition whilst using abundantly available coal. The methanol plant will be a world scale facility and any excess methanol above that required for MEG production will be used in other Jiutai facilities. The formaldehyde plant will have an annual capacity of 1,500,000 tonnes per annum.
