HQCEC is the general designer of the Project. The Project includes six process units: ethylene, high pressure polyethylene, full-density polyethylene, polypropylene, gasoline hydrogenation and butadiene extraction. The leading unit, i.e. the ethylene unit, was designed by HQCEC who rendered relevant technical services therefor, such as basic design, detailed design, technical services for procurement and onsite construction and startup.

The ethylene unit takes naphtha and hydrogenated tail oil as the main feed and uses internationally advanced front-end depropanization and front-end hydrogenation technology. The whole unit is composed feed treatment, cracking, quenching, compression, cold separation, hot separation, waste alkali treatment (investment not included in the ethylene unit), flare, control room, the substation and other auxiliary facilities.

It took only 29.5 months for the ethylene unit to successfully start up at first try and yield on-spec ethylene product on November 20, 2006 from the start of preparation of PDP after the Kick-Off Meeting on June 11, 2004. The construction period was so short that set the best record for ethylene project constructions in China and even in the world. Up to now, the whole unit has kept running in a stead manner, with the raw materials consumption and ethylene yield surpassing the world’s advanced level, product quality reaching the world’ advanced level, utilities consumption reaching China’s advanced level and the waste discharge meeting the national and regional standard requirements.

On this project, HQCEC undertook the basic design (except that of the cracking furnace area, which was done by the licensor) and all detailed design for the ethylene unit independently. It’s for the first time in China that a domestic engineering company finished basic engineering design independently for such a large ethylene unit for an annual production of over 460,000 tons based on imported process package only. During the engineering phase of the ethylene unit, HQCEC overcame a series of difficulties involved in engineering the unit of large scale. Designers did a lot of work on system development based on the foreign process package to make it meet the engineering requirements and accomplished many technical innovations.

The Unit’s successful startup at first try demonstrates that for large ethylene units in China it is with the shortest construction period, the least investment, highest percentage of localization of design and the shortest period of time from start of operation to reaching the expected capacity.