Hungry for carbon dioxide
A new neighbor of Dow will capture emissions and create hydrogen
A new plant will capture emissions from Dow’s huge Freeport campus.
Dow Chemical Co.’s $6billion Gulf Coast expansion—mostly in Freeport and Lake Jackson—is getting environmentally friendlier, thanks to a neighboring plant completed last week by the Connecticut company Praxair.
Praxair, a leading producer of industrial gases such as acetylene, helium and neon, said its plant will capture emissions from Dow’ s huge Free port campus and convert the by-product into high-purity hydrogen used to make chemicals and plastics.
Dow is expected to complete the bulk of its expansion later this year as it brings new chemical and plastics production online and creates about 500 permanent jobs. The site is Dow’s largest complex in the world; the Michigan company designed and built Lake Jackson 73 years ago to house workers when it chose rural Freeport as an operations site.
Pr ax air CEO Steve Angel said the company launched operations at the $400 million hydrogen recovery and processing plant, which could link up as early as June with Dow’ s nearly completed plant to manufacture 1.5 million tons per year of ethylene, the primary building block of most plastics. The plant can independently produce hydrogen before it links with the cracker.
The Pr ax air plant would prevent the escape of 300,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide fromthe $2 billion eythylene plant. That’s less than half the Dow plant’s carbon emissions.
“You can do things good for the society as you grow,” Dow president Jim Fitterling said while visiting the plant last week .“We take our foot print down and make our impact on the communities less .”
The Dow expansion will add more ethylene, polyethylene, propylene and plastics manufacturing in Freeport. Praxair, meanwhile, is investing about $1 billion along the Texas GulfCoast through 2019, including new hydrogen and nitrogen pipe- lines connecting Freeport to Texas City, where existing pipelines connect to other chemical plants in Texas and Louisiana, Angel said.
“Texas could easily end up being our second-biggest revenue region globally,” Angel said.
The hydrogen produced by Pr ax air will feed Dow operations, as well as an ammonia plant developed by Germany-based BASF and Norway-based Yara International that’s scheduled to open in 2017. Dow is the world’s second-largest chemical maker after BA SF.
Dow is merging with DuPont of Wilmington, Del ., but the combined entity will eventually splinter into three separate companies, including one still named Dow that would continue to own and run the Free port complex. The materials science business would operate under the Dow name, the agribusiness under DuPont and specialty products under a yet-to-be determined brand.
The$130 billion merger could close as soon as this spring, but the three-way split will take longer.
Praxair, meanwhile, said in December that it would combine in so-called merger of equals, valued at $35 billion, with Germany’s Linde to create the world’s largest industrial gas company. Angel will remain CEO of the combined company that will maintain the Lin de name.
Praxair has a handful of other plants in the Houston area. Linde recently moved into the Energy Corridor in Linde Plaza—previously Jacobs Plaza.
“You can do good things for the society as you grow.” Jim Fitterling, Dow president