While the industry capacity concentration has increased, the number of maleic anhydride production enterprises has also declined in recent years. According to incomplete statistics, there are currently 25 major manufacturers of maleic anhydride in China. With Qixiang Tengda 200,000 tons/year plant put into operation, the scale of single maleic anhydride production enterprises in China has reached 400,000 tons/year. From the perspective of production capacity distribution structure, there are 6 large production enterprises with an annual capacity of more than 100,000 tons, and the total production capacity accounts for 64% of the total domestic production capacity. There are 5 medium-sized production enterprises with an annual capacity of 50,000 to 90,000 tons, accounting for 12% of the total domestic production capacity, and 15 small production enterprises with an annual capacity of 10,000 to 40,000 tons, accounting for 24% of the total domestic production capacity. At present, the domestic maleic anhydride industry has shown that the head enterprise is dominant, and the waist and tail shrink.
The trend towards integration is becoming more obvious
With the subsequent production capacity has been put into production, the integration trend of maleic anhydride in China has become more obvious, and more enterprises have expanded maleic anhydride while supporting the downstream deep processing industry chain, such as BDO. Previously, the reason why maleic anhydride process BDO has been quiet for a long time is that its raw material maleic anhydride price is high, and it is not cost-effective to purchase maleic anhydride to do BDO. Therefore, new maleic anhydride BDO projects generally choose to do maleic anhydride themselves. Maleic anhydride raw material n-butane generally needs to be purchased from domestic refining and petrochemical enterprises or imported from abroad, the price of raw materials and the supply of raw materials is difficult to control, if you can own n-butane, it has more advantages in ensuring the stability of raw material supply. According to Industrial Securities research, maleic anhydride BDO will also be highly profitable as BDO prices soar in 2021. Therefore, some relevant experts predict that in the long run, the gradual replacement of the current mainstream acetylenic aldehyde method by low-energy maleic anhydride method BDO is a high probability event.
In 2022, the global BDO capacity is 3.9 million tons/year, of which China's BDO capacity is about 2.3 million tons/year. In 2023, Chongqing Hongqing Da 200,000 tons/year, Inner Mongolia Junzheng 1.2 million tons/year, and Inner Mongolia 3D 900,000 tons/year will be put into operation. In 2024, Wanhua Chemical (Ningxia) 320,000 tons/year, Fujian Zhongjing Petrochemical 600,000 tons/year and other 7 sets of plants are expected to be put into operation; In 2025, Zhejiang Petrochemical 600,000 tons/year, Hengli Petrochemical 600,000 tons/year plant is also planned to put into operation. It is expected that from 2023 to 2025, the new capacity of domestic BDO with high certainty will be about 2.1 million tons/year, 1.6 million tons/year and 500,000 tons/year, respectively, and the domestic BDO capacity will reach 6 million tons/year by the end of 2024. In the long term, the total planned capacity of BDO exceeds 20 million tons/year, and the domestic BDO capacity will be increased by more than 10 times if it is fully put into operation.
The increasing capacity of BDO has driven the rapid expansion of the maleic anhydride industry. The upstream and downstream extension based on BDO process of maleic anhydride process can enable petrochemical enterprises in eastern China to give full play to the advantages of their raw materials and product systems. Using C4 raw gas as the starting point, high purity n-butane oxidation after separation is used to produce maleic anhydride, and then hydrogenation or electrolysis from maleic anhydride to produce BDO or succinic acid, and finally PBAT and PBS are formed with PTA, adipic acid and other petrochemical products. This production route (n-butane - maleic anhydride -BDO-PBAT/PBS) is being favored by more and more petrochemical enterprises, and the integration level of maleic anhydride industry will also be improved. According to Zhuo Chuang information statistics, the proportion of maleic anhydride self-consumption in the future will increase from about 10% at present to more than 50%.
At present, the n-butane-maleic anhydride process-BDO process has obvious cost advantages, mature technology, less pollution, and greater development potential. The newly built maleic anhydride BDO projects in the past two years are basically based on n-butane as raw materials, and the new capacity of Hengli Petrochemical, Oriental Shenghong, Zhejiang Petrochemical and other private refining and chemical manufacturers is also mainly based on maleic anhydride. In the case of ensuring the supply of raw materials, the future cost end is close to that of western calcium carbide companies, which has advantages in low oil prices.
In the future, if the n-butane/maleic anhydride method can be combined with the existing petrochemical cracking plant to produce maleic anhydride with its by-product of n-butane and then make BDO, the production cost of BDO will be greatly reduced. In addition, the process has the advantages of high product quality, low project investment, and less pollutant emission, and will be more competitive in the market.
