Lyondell Basell is growing in the Houston area

the United States, a key market for polypropylene is the automobile industry, which uses the plastic in bumpers, interior trim and even under the hood. Globally, packaging and plastic products for surging middle classes in Asia represent the biggest markets for polypropylene, Patel said.

Lyondell Basell’s expansion along the Ship Channel will add a plant to make propylene oxide, which is used to make bedding, carpeting, coatings, building materials and adhesives, and the by-product tertiary butyl alcohol, which is refined into an fuel additive. The plant will have the biggest production capacity in the world for these chemicals, capable of manufacturing 1 billion pounds of propylene oxide and 2.2 billion pounds of tertiary butyl alcohol a year.

The company will refine tertiary butyl alcohol into fuel additives at its nearby Bayport facility in Pasadena. Construction on the project is slated to begin next year, with completion scheduled for 2021.

In the last few years, Lyondell Basell also has completed ethylene expansions at its Channelview, La Porte and Corpus Christi sites, as well as a plastics expansion in Matagorda.

Other companies are expanding petrochemical operations along the Gulf Coast, too. DowDuPont recently started up a massive ethylene and plastics plants in Freeport. Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. are both completing massive ethane processing plants in the Baytown area. Houston’s Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the Mexican chemical maker Mexichem opened a smaller ethane processing plant earlier this year outside Corpus Christi.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade group, estimates that the Texas Gulf Coast accounts for about $70 billion of the $185 billion in petrochemical plants completed since 2010 or planned through 2023.