Next year, 23 companies in the U.S. and Canadian chemical processing industry (CPI) will be each spending $100 million or more on a combined 99 projects, according to a survey released Wednesday by Industrial Info Resources.
The projects, ranging from traditional petrochemical projects to cogens and petroleum coke gasification, total over $4.6 billion in active capital and maintenance spending planned for next year.
The leader in individual company spending for 2007 is CF Industries, out of Lake Zurich, Ill., a chemical company that normally would not be in the list of top spenders, the report noted. CF Industries is planning a major $700 million coke gasification to hydrogen plant addition in Louisiana.
The next big spender is Formosa Plastics Corp. USA, in Livingston, N.J. One of the largest projects in the works by Formosa will also utilize petroleum coke as a feedstock, according to Industrial Info.
Formosa plans to start building, in the summer of 2007, a $300 million grassroot petroleum coke-fired power plant in Port Lavaca, Texas, only three miles from its Point Comfort olefins complex, which will consume the power generated from this new site.
Other top spending companies include Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP (nine projects totaling $321 million), BP (four projects totaling $317 million), and Eastman Chemical Co. ( three projects totaling $207 million), the survey statistics showed.
This level of spending by the companies that traditionally contribute largely to the overall spending supports Industrial Info’s published Confidence Factor for the CPI of over 65 percent.
The Confidence Factor measures the number of active and completed projects against cancelled project activity over a nearly five-year span to determine the level of confidence in future projects actually maturing and moving forward.