ATOFINA completes $25 million upgrade to Bayport plant
The facility produces bimodal HMW-HDPE resins and unimodal specialty resins for the film and industrial pipe industries. ATOFINA is now developing new film and pipe grades with enhanced processing and properties using proprietary catalyst technology coupled with the new process control capabilities.
A new control room was built with a state-of-the-art control system to monitor and control more than 15,000 points in the process. Advanced closed loop process control schemes, coupled with modern instrumentation hardware, now ensure that critical process variables such as feed rates, temperatures and pressures are operated with precise control.
In May 2001, a new finishing section was commissioned. The finishing system features a new additive feeding system and a high intensity compounding line that provide exact homogenization and mixing of the polymer. One benefit of the new finishing system is demonstrated by the extremely low gel counts in Finathene® HMW-HDPE film resins.
ATOFINA also operates a slurry loop reactor built in 1998 at its Bayport site with a capacity of 460 million pounds per year. Total Bayport site capacity now stands at 900 million pounds per year.
ATOFINA, the chemical branch of TotalFinaElf, was created in April 2000 from the merger of the chemical and petrochemical activities of TotalFina and Elf Aquitaine. It is headquartered in Paris, France with world sales in excess of $16 billion. ATOFINA is the world's fifth largest chemical company, employing over 70,000 people worldwide. ATOFINA's chemicals activities hold leading position in both Europe and the world in each of their markets: Petrochemical and commodity polymers, intermediates and Performance Polymers, and Specialty Chemicals.
In the US ATOFINA Petrochemicals Inc. is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and has world-scale facilities producing polypropylene, polyethylene, styrene and polystyrene.