Richard Higgs 
EUROPEAN PLASTICS NEWS
Published: September 24, 2014 12:15 pm ET
Updated: September 24, 2014 12:19 pm ET

Image By: RusVinyl PVC
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, attended the official launch of the new RusVinyl PVC plant.

Russia has taken a major new step towards satisfying its rising domestic PVC demand with the long-awaited launch of the RusVinyl PVC plant at Kstovo in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

The 330,000 metric tons per year PVC facility, a joint venture between Russian petrochemicals giant Sibur Holding and SolVin, the European Solvay/BASF vinyl partnership, was finally inaugurated last week during an event attended by Russian president Valdimir Putin.

Last year, Russia’s annual PVC consumption exceeded 1 million metric tons, of which only about half was produced internally. The RusVinyl complex should help plug the national supply gap and aims to feed further downstream development in Russia.

Teams from SolVin and Sibur “made this the most modern and environmentally friendly, fully integrated PVC production plant in the world,” the SolVin chairman Jacques van Rijckvorsel said at the event.

One of the country’s biggest petrochemicals projects, the 1.4 billion euro ($1.79 billion) RusVinyl complex is being heralded as one of the world’s most environmentally friendly and technically advanced vinyl production plants.

Each section of the facility has multi-tier safety systems. It uses an advanced membrane process to prevent hazardous substances being formed during electrolysis and uses a patented technology that makes electrolysis completely waste-free, according to Sibur.

The vinyl complex, which also has caustic soda production of 225,000 tonnes per year, is fed with ethylene from Sibur’s nearby expanded 360,000 tonnes per year Kstovo steam cracker and salt raw material from Russia’s Astrakhan region and from neighboring Belarus.

The realization of this large scale project had introduced the “best global practices and technologies to the Russian market,” said Sibur chairman Leonid Mikhelson. “The new petrochemical facility will beneficially impact Russia’s economic development by meeting the challenge of import substitution,” he said at its launch.