(Adds Sinochem Quanzhou, updates Sichuan) April 2 (Reuters) - State-owned Sinochem has gotapproval from the National Development and Reform Commission forpreliminary work for a 1.0 million tonnes per year (tpy)ethylene project in Quanzhou of the southeastern Fujianprovince, the company said on its website (www.qpcc.com.cn). Sinochem started test runs at its 240,000 barrels-per-dayQuanzhou refinery in January. PetroChina started operation of a 800,000 tpyethylene plant in the southwest Sichuan province in the firstquarter of this year. China, keen to cut its import dependence on ethylene fromnear 50 percent currently, will likely add some 8 million tpyethylene capacity between 2014 and 2016. These projects will either be expansion of existingfacilities or greenfield plants through joint ventures withcompanies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Qatar Petroleum and Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Industry leader Sinopec Corp contributes about two-thirds ofChina's ethylene output, followed by PetroChina and ChinaNational Offshore Oil Co, the parent of CNOOC Ltd. Ethylene is a key building block for petrochemicals, fromplastics to rubber to synthetic fibre, and also a key factordriving up demand for refined oil products like naphtha. The following table lists ethylene plants started since2009, according to industry sources and Chinese media reports.-------------------------------------------------------------- Company Location New Capacity Start-up (tonnes) --------------------------------------------------------------SNP/Aramco/Exxon Fujian 800,000 mid-2009 PetroChina Dushanzi 1,000,000 late 2009 Norinco/Zhenhua Panjin 480,000 late 2009 Sinopec/SABIC Tianjin 1,000,000 Jan 2010 Sinopec Zhenhai 1,000,000 Q1 2010 Sinopec/BASF Nanjing 150,000 2011 PetroChina Daqing 600,000 June 2012 PetroChina Fushun 800,000 Oct 2012 Sinopec/SK Wuhan 800,000 July 2013PetroChina Sichuan 800,000 Q1 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------TOTAL 7.43 mln Under construction and planned:------------------------------------------------------------ Sinopec/Exxon/ Fujian 200,000 NA CNOOC Huizhou 1,000,000 2015/16 Sinopec/Kuwait Zhanjiang 1,000,000 2014 Sinopec* Nanjing 800,000 2015PetroChina* Lanzhou 1,000,000 NA PetroChina/Shell* Taizhou 1,200,000 NASinopec Hainan 1,000,000 2015/16Sinopec* Qingdao 1,000,000 NA Sinochem* Quanzhou 1,000,000 NA ------------------------------------------------------------ TOTAL 8.2 mln *pending government approval (Reporting by Judy Hua and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
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