Globalpu News: According to the news of "American Chemical Weekly" on June 15, American Enterprise Products (Enterprise Products) Products) is evaluating a $5 billion ethane cracker near Beaumont, Texas. The unit, with an ethylene production capacity of 2 million metric tons per year, will be built at Enterprise Products' Beaumont Ocean West Terminal facility on the Neches River near Beaumont in the state. A filing to local Texas officials for the tax cut estimates that construction will begin in the second quarter of 2024. An Enterprise Products spokesman said the company had not made a final investment decision and it was too early to comment further on that decision or the investment timeline.
In December, Enterprise Products' co-CEO and the company's senior vice president of petrochemicals said the company had been considering building a cracker to supply derivatives producers who didn't want to build their own.
Enterprise Products currently has no ethylene production assets, but operates an ethylene export terminal and storage and pipeline assets that serve as an open market storage and trading hub for ethylene manufacturers.
Current Enterprise Products' Beaumont Ocean West Terminal includes three deepwater terminals and a barge terminal, facilitating the import and export of crude oil and related products.
The company's Morgan's in the Houston Seaway The Point facility operates an ethylene export terminal with a design capacity of 1 million tonnes/year of ethylene. The company recently stated that the actual export capacity of the terminal reached 125% of the designed capacity. Enterprise Products has announced plans to expand its export terminal by 50% by the second half of 2023 and double it to more than 2 million tonnes/year by 2025.
Enterprise Products has told investors that U.S. ethylene economics support petrochemical expansion and that a large supply of ethane could support investment. In April, Enterprise Products said at an investor event that at current economics, a new 1.5 million ton/year ethane cracker in the U.S. would generate $1 billion more than a naphtha cracker in Europe. profit.
Other midstream oil and gas companies are also considering entering the ethylene production space. Energy Transfer Partners said in May it was also evaluating a cracker project on the Gulf Coast. The company said it was negotiating with customers to secure long-term fee agreements before making a final investment decision.
In March, Houston-based KBR announced that it had won a contract from an undisclosed oil and gas midstream company to build a world-scale olefins unit in the United States. The Gulf Coast facility will be able to produce 2.4 million tons of light olefins per year, KBR said. 
