The market demand for refined ethylene oxide is increasing, and there are more domestic production companies

Refined ethylene oxide is also called commercial ethylene oxide, which refers to ethylene oxide used for non-ethylene glycol purposes. Ethylene oxide is an important derivative of ethylene. As an important organic chemical raw material, ethylene oxide is widely used in construction, textiles, coatings, metal processing, medicine, pesticides, papermaking and other fields. Ethylene oxide can be divided into crude ethylene oxide and refined ethylene oxide. Crude ethylene oxide can be further purified to obtain refined ethylene oxide. Industrially, crude ethylene oxide is mainly produced by ethylene and Oxygen is only used for analytical purification and refining to prepare refined ethylene oxide.

Refined ethylene oxide can be used to produce polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers, ethanolamine, glycol ethers, ethoxylates, polyether polyols, etc., among which polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers are refined ethylene oxide The main application scenarios account for more than 50% of applications. In recent years, with the acceleration of urbanization, the market demand for water-reducing agents has continued to increase. In 2021, the market size of my country’s water-reducing agents will be approximately 28.6 billion yuan. Polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers have excellent performance and are the future development trend of the water-reducing agent market. With consumption upgrading, the market application of polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers will be further expanded, which will benefit the development of the refined ethylene oxide industry.

According to the “China Refined Ethylene Oxide Industry Market In-depth Assessment and 2022-2026 Investment Feasibility Consultation Report released by the Industrial Research Center 》 shows that in recent years, benefiting from the rapid growth in demand and improvement in technology level, the refined ethylene oxide market has developed rapidly, and it has gradually become a highlight of the development of the ethylene oxide industry. There are many refined ethylene oxide manufacturers in my country and the market competition is fierce, including Sinopec, PetroChina, Sanjiang New Materials, Nanjing Dana, Fujian United, Yangzhou Aoke Chemical, Sanjiang Chemical, Jinyan Chemical, etc.

In order to meet the growing market demand, there are more new and expanded refined ethylene oxide projects. For example, in 2021, Yangzi Petrochemical-BASF Co., Ltd. invested more than 2.9 billion yuan in the “Integrated Phase 2.8 Expansion Project”, which includes the expansion of refined ethylene oxide. The ethylene oxide production capacity reaches 50,000 tons/year, and the company’s refined ethylene oxide annual production capacity will reach 200,000 tons after expansion.

The raw materials for the production of refined ethylene oxide are ethylene and MTO, of which ethylene is the main raw material, and its price changes have a greater impact on the production cost of refined ethylene oxide. In the past two years, due to the impact of the epidemic and international conflicts, global crude oil supply has declined, and ethylene prices have risen sharply, which in turn has driven up the price of refined ethylene oxide, and there is still room for the price of refined ethylene oxide to rise in the short term.

my country is a major producer of ethylene oxide. At present, the refined ethylene oxide industry chain is relatively complete, and the technical routes are divided into Shell, SD and Shell + SD. Industry analysts said that refined ethylene oxide is mainly used in the field of polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers. In recent years, with the As urbanization accelerates, the demand for polycarboxylate water-reducing agent monomers increases, which is beneficial to the development of the refined ethylene oxide industry.