According to a report released recently by Nexant Chem Systems consulting company, due to the oversupply of products and low prices in recent years, coupled with poor profitability, the future direction of the aromatics industry has not attracted sufficient attention from industry professionals. In fact, as the current demand for aromatic hydrocarbons continues to grow and the capacity growth rate slows down, global supply of pure benzene and para-xylene may be insufficient in the next few years.
According to the report, normally, aromatic hydrocarbon production is a by-product of ethylene and gasoline production. It is expected that these devices may not be able to meet the market demand for pure benzene and paraxylene in the future as a by-product source. It is predicted that in order to meet future demand growth, between 2006 and 2015, the world needs a new increase of approximately 16 million tons/year of paraxylene and 14 million tons/year of pure benzene production capacity.
However, the main problem facing the petrochemical industry is that in the future, with the slowdown in the growth of gasoline demand, the growth rate of aromatic hydrocarbons available to the reformer will inevitably decline. It is predicted that the global gasoline demand growth in the next 10 years will be only 1% to 1.5%/year. The United States, as the world's largest gasoline consumption area, has become more and more sensitive to the relationship between gasoline demand and cost due to the high international crude oil prices, and the annual growth rate of gasoline demand in the United States will be reduced to 1%. The situation in Western Europe is even worse. As Western European cars will adopt more economical diesel engines, the demand for gasoline is expected to decline at a rate of 2% per year.
In general, the source of aromatics produced by the refinery reform process in the United States and Europe will continue to grow. On the other hand, Western Europe's limited production capacity for newly-built naphtha crackers will inevitably affect the increase in pure benzene production in the cracked gasoline segment in the future. In this region, the production capacity of pyrolysis gasoline's aromatic hydrocarbons will depend more on existing plant stimulation measures. In other regions, the situation is relatively better. With the newly-built aromatics supply capacity successively put into production, Asia will become the leader in production capacity. As Asia’s auto ownership continues to grow, it will drive Asian gasoline demand to continue growing at an annual rate of 2%, and will drive the start-up of new refineries in Asia. In addition, Asia will build more than one naphtha feedstock ethylene cracker in the next 10 years, which will increase the production capacity of aromatics.
With the successive production of new export-oriented refineries and petrochemical plants in the Middle East, the supply of aromatics in the Middle East will increase substantially. In particular, Saudi Arabia and Iran will also construct a number of cracking devices for heavy raw materials, which will inevitably increase the production of pyrolysis gasoline. However, even with these aromatic hydrocarbon production capacity, it is still unable to meet the fast-growing demand in the future.