Oct 25 2004
The Dow Chemical Company and Polipropileno del Caribe S.A. (Propilco) today announced in a signing cermony that they have reached an agreement for Propilco to expand its plant in Cartagena, Columbia, that uses UNIPOL™ PP Process technology. The expansion will take the Propilco plant from its original design capacity of 120 KTA to 200 KTA. Its output will help to supply growing market demand for polypropylene in Columbia, as well as in Latin America and Caribbean countries.
In addition to the plant expansion, Propilco will also purchase Dow’s proprietary UNIPOL™ UNIPPAC™ Advanced Process Control package. This new Windows NT-based automated process control package is specifically designed and configured for plants that operate the UNIPOL™ PP process technology and represents a major advance over third-party developed advanced process control systems. It is designed to seamlessly integrate with plant automation and company enterprise resource planning (ERP) Information Systems.
“We’re pleased that Propilco has chosen to take advantage of the flexibility of UNIPOL PP technology by expanding their plant’s capacity and that they see the synergistic value of adding Dow’s proprietary advanced process control system at this time. We’re eager to continue working with this innovative company on these and other future technology development projects,” said John Yimoyines, vice president of Technology Licensing and Catalyst for Dow.
Dr. Orlando Cabrales, president of Propilco, states, “We decided to purchase the UNIPOL UNIPPAC Advanced Process Control system concurrently with our capacity expansion in order to maximize the value of our capital investment. We believe that we will be able to optimize our throughput of prime grade product and improve our operating reliability, with minimal product variation or downtime, and essentially gain even more capacity from our plant.”
The Propilco Cartagena facility started production in 1990. The expansion project is expected to be complete in early 2006. Propilco currently produces a broad slate of polypropylene homopolymers, random copolymers and impact copolymers that find uses in fiber, BOPP film, cast film, tubular water quench film, heat seal film, spunbond, blow molding, injection molding and extrusion blow molding applications.
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