Adisseo, a subsidiary of China National BlueStar, said the successful start-up of its new plant in Nanjing, China (BANC2) makes it one of the world's largest liquid methionine production platforms.
The company said it will consolidate Adisseo's position in methionine globally while laying a solid industrial foundation for boosting the penetration of liquid methionine in the Chinese market and beyond.
The start-up ceremony for the facility was held yesterday.
Yang Shihao, deputy general manager of Sinochem Holdings, the parent company of China National BlueStar, commented: "With the rapid population growth in China, low-cost and high-efficiency methionine has played and will always play an irreplaceable role in ensuring the stability of meat production and supply, promoting food security, and saving land resources.”
The BANC2 project was officially launched in early 2018 and it managed to stayed on scheduled despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Adisseo’s Francois Mailhos, who was director of the project.
The plant has successfully completed a trial run, he added, with the first batch of liquid methionine products having come off the production line, and having entered the market successfully.
Methionine capacity and debottlenecking projects
In February this year, we reported on how methionine supply, globally, was set to expand with several capacity and debottlenecking projects in the works, nothing then that Adisseo was in the final stages of commissioning the Nanjing plant.
Meanwhile, the final quarter of 2021 saw Adisseo’s European debottlenecking project add 30,000 tons per annum (t/a) of DL-Methionine (DLM) to the market
Evonik announced in February it was building a methyl mercaptan plant in Mobile, Alabama, US. Methyl mercaptan is a key intermediate in the production of DL-Methionine (MetAMINO) that Evonik currently sources from third parties. Mobile is one of Evonik's strategic hubs serving North and South American markets, next to Antwerp in Belgium and Singapore.
Its hubs in Antwerp and Singapore are already fully backward integrated. The Mobile plant is scheduled to come on stream in the second half of 2024, and the investment budget for that is around €150m (US$168.3m) over three years.
Back to China, and Sichuan Hebang’s MHA factory, which recently came on stream, brings additional market capacity of 70,000 t/a. Swiss data analysts, Kemiex, also noted in February that Wanhua Chemical was planning a 150,000 t/a methionine project and that NHU and Sinopec had announced a US$472m JV for liquid methionine, in addition to NHU’s ongoing 150,000 t/a MHA expansion.
