Sinopec Corp is set to turn a southern China unit into a top oil refinery and petrochemicals producer by 2007 as part of the state oil firm’s expansion plans to meet soaring domestic demand, a Chinese industry official said.

Sinopec, Asia’s top refiner, plans to boost crude run capacity at Maoming Petrochemical Corp (MPC) in Guangdong province by nearly 50 per cent to 20 million tonnes per year (tpy), or 410,000 barrels per day, making it one of the largest in China, by mid-2007, the official said.
Galloping demand in the world’s second-largest oil consumer is stretching China’s refining system, with most plants pumping at full tilt. State refineries, mostly geared to process sour crude from the Middle East, are stepping up expansion plans.
Sinopec was also slated to enlarge Maoming’s output of ethylene, the key building block for petrochemicals, to one million tpy, from the current 390,000 tpy, in the same period.
China is key driver behind the global petrochemical boom, with demand racing at a double digits.
“The expansion target is bigger than earlier plans,” said an official from MPC, who was attending the first youth forum of the World Petroleum Conference.
Under an earlier upgrade proposal, Maoming was expected to be expanded to 350,000 bpd for the refinery and 800,000 tpy for ethylene.
The Maoming official said on the sidelines of the conference that his plant would be running at nearly 97 per cent for this year at its 277,000 bpd refining capacity.
Under the expansion plan, Maoming would add a new 200,000 bpd crude distillation unit and mothball an old 50,000 bpd crude unit started in the mid 1960s.