BASF and DuPont to Build Nylon Plant in China

BASF AG (U.S. offices: Mount Olive, N.J.) and DuPont have selected DongFang, Hainan, in the People's Republic of China as the manufacturing site for their joint venture to produce and sell nylon intermediates in Asia. The two companies are equal partners in the Integrated Nylon Technology venture, which was announced in April 1996. Total investment in the joint venture is expected to be approximately $900 million.

The partners recently signed a letter of intent with the China National Offshore Oil Company to negotiate the supply of natural gas to the manufacturing facility. The Chinese government is well along in its review of the joint venture application to form a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise in China.

"BASF is the largest foreign investor in the Chinese chemical industry, and our position will be further strengthened by this joint venture with DuPont," said Werner Burgert, executive vice president of BASF Corporation and president of the company's worldwide Fiber Products Division. "This joint venture reflects our strategy to establish a nylon value chain in China. The first step in this commitment is the construction now underway of a plant in Shanghai for the production of nylon carpet fibers. The Integrated Nylon Technology venture is the next step." Added Eduard Van Wely, a DuPont SVP: "We remain totally committed to this joint venture, although it has taken longer to reach this point than we anticipated."

Construction of the manufacturing facility in DongFang, which will produce approximately 300 kilotons of adiponitrile annually from butadiene, is scheduled to begin in early 1999. The facility will use the world's most competitive processes, based on combined BASF/DuPont technologies. It will convert the adiponitrile to both caprolactam for nylon 6 production and hexamethylenediamine for nylon 6,6 production at a significant cost advantage. Caprolactam capacity will be 150 kilotons annually. This will be the first time caprolactam has been produced commercially from adiponitrile. Currently, the new process is being optimized in a a large-scale pilot plant in Germany. The produced caprolactam, polycaprolactam and fibers meet all specifications.

When asked about process details, a BASF spokesperson offered a paper presented in 1997 by Charles Fryer of Tecnon Consulting UK. He noted that conventional processes (hydroxylamine sulfate-see Fig. 1, nitric oxide hydrogenation, hydroxylamine phosphate and photonitrosation), as well as the Snia route that starts with toluene instead of cyclohexanone, all produce byproduct ammonium sulfate. This byproduct can be a valuable material for meeting fertilizer demands in agricultural countries, but its economics vary from region to region. Fryer conjectured that the BASF/DuPont caprolactam process (Fig. 2) produces no such byproduct, involves the deamination and cyclization of 6-aminohexanoamide, and that "some quite novel catalysis" is necessary.

Figure 1

Figure 2

In an economic analysis of the process, Fryer said that the process will be very competitive when natural gas (needed to make hydrogen cyanide for the adiponitrile synthesis) is cheap, and when the cost of butadience is economical relative to benzene (the starting point for cyclohexanone). Capital costs are attractive, especially because of the unusually large scale of the proposed China plant.

Edited by Nick Basta