Plastics & Rubber Weekly
Leverkusen, Germany -- Bayer MaterialScience plans to invest roughly Euro 100 million ($139 million) to expand its MDI (methylene diphenyl diisocyanate) plant at Bayer's Brunsbuettel industrial park in Germany. The move is part of the company's previously announced project to optimise isocyanate production in Europe.
The first of the coordinated phases is the construction of a 300-kilotonnes-per-annum (ktpa) gas-phase-phosgenation plant to make TDI (toluene diisocyanate) in Dormagen. The facility is scheduled to come on stream in 2014.
Following this, annual capacity of the existing 160 ktpa MDI plant in Brunsbuettel will first be debottlenecked to 200 ktpa in 2012, and will then be doubled to about 420kpta by about 2016.
"The planned world-scale MDI production facility is intended to strengthen the site and to provide long-term job security at the plant and in the region," said Dr Tony Van Osselaer, member of the Bayer MaterialScience board of management.
"The plastics industry expects global demand for MDI and TDI to continue to rise," added Peter Vanacker, head of the polyurethanes business at Bayer MaterialScience. "With the phased implementation of our optimisation concept, we hope to further expand our leading position in this global market, which is expected to experience long-term growth."
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