Location: South Korea
Partners: TotalEnergies (50%), Hanwha (50%)
Main activity: Refining and petrochemicals
Commissioning: 1991
In South Korea, TotalEnergies and Hanwha are partners at the Daesan integrated refining and petrochemicals platform as part of the 50/50 Hanwha Total Petrochemical joint venture. The Daesan facility manufactures petroleum products such as kerosene, diesel and gasoline as well as polypropylene, polyethylene, styrene, paraxylene and ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) copolymer. All are essential components for manufacturing many everyday products.
The Daesan refining and petrochemicals platform in South Korea gives TotalEnergies a strategic position in Asia. To meet the strong growth in demand for plastics in Asia, both in South Korea and China, we made several investment projects there:
- A nearly $2 billion upgrade, completed in late 2014, which doubled the facility’s production capacity;
- A $750 million upgrade in 2017, which further increased the platform’s ethylene production capacity by 30% in 2019 and more than doubled polyethylene production capacity in 2020;
- A $500 million upgrade in 2018, which allowed us to increase polypropylene production capacity by 60% and ethylene production capacity by a further 10%. The project, completed in 2021, brought annual production capacity to 1.1 million metric tons for propylene and 1.5 million metric tons for ethylene.
The projects also enhance the platform’s flexibility by allowing it to process propane, a cheap feedstock in plentiful supply since the shale gas revolution in the United States.
The polymers will be manufactured using the cutting-edge Advanced Double Loop technology licensed by TotalEnergies and Chevron Phillips Chemical Company, supplying the growing Asian market with high value-added products.
