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German Firm Ready to Serve Iran Petchem Sector
The German company Chemieanlagenbau Chemnitz GmbH (CAC) has expressed its willingness to transfer technology to Iran to serve Iran's petrochemical sector.
Mario Kuschel, head of Process Engineering bei Chemieanlagenbau Chemnitz GmbH, told Iran Petroleum that Iranian petrochemical companies have shown interest in the CAC technology, too.
The following is the full text of the interview conducted with Kuschel on the sidelines of Iran Oil Show in Tehran.
Q: Would you please tell us about the field of activity of your company?
A: So starting point because you already have so many methanol plants, we thought no need for our family-owned company to invest in something which is already available on the market and the current capacity of production of methanol is five million tons per year as far as I am informed, you know better than I, more than one third of it is exported to China and China is not consuming more than the amount that they consumed in the past and as far as I know 15 million tons capacity of methanol is still on schedule to be a finished plant so that will certainly put a lot of pressure on the methanol producers to find buyers for this methanol.
The big hope was of course the conversion of methanol to olefins like propylene but we discovered that based on the activities of steam crackers being built globally to a large broad scale ,within the next years I think we will have one million ton of olefin and ethylene capacity in India, we will also have another million ton capacity of ethylene and propylene as I think 6,000 tons exists, so these major steam crackers we will have cheap olefins available so we consider methanol to olefins not to be a very viable output to methanol plants because the price of propylene already is depressed and with increasing capacities and stagnant demand I doubt that these prices will rise.
That is why we think of converting methanol to gasoline, gasoline prices are rising already again. I think that delta of the current methanol price versus the rising price of gasoline will make this technology very attractive.
So you can make use of this scheme that is all public information. This scheme shows roughly how everything works. So here we have the raw methanol from your methanol plants, it doesn’t even have to be distilled. Methanol forms about 46 percent of water which can be re-used in the synthetic gas because most of your methanol originates from crude oil gases so you need water again. So we would liberate the water for this process and the reactor here allows stirring the composition of what you obtain. So if the methanol plant wants to produce a bigger amount of LPG, they keep the residence time short and the temperature low. If they want to have a precursor like maleic anhydride equivalent, one to four, five tetra-methyl benzene, they keep the residence time up and temperatures high and this determines the quantity of these two. So there is no such tool in the world as this reactor which enables you to control what you obtain as a product. No refinery can do that.
The important advantage of this can be observed in the table wherein you see the composition of premium gasoline and its comparison with the European standard. As I have mentioned and you can see density is identical but there are differences in olefins and that is what has made it attractive for the army which needs to have enough reserves. This compound of olefin makes gasoline age. So after one or two years, gasoline which has been exposed to oxygen is no longer performing properly in the engine. So the army