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Platts 2004/8/5

Mexican business leaders lobby for first Pheonix project site

Business leaders from the Mexico's Veracruz state Thursday launched a campaign to name Coatzacoalcos as the site of the $1.8-bil first stage of state Pemex's Phoenix project to revive the nation's petrochemicals industry. Coatzacoalcos, site of most of Pemex's major petrochemical complexes, faces stiff competition from Altamira, Tamaulipas, further north on the Gulf and fast-developing as a center for private-sector production of chemicals and fibers.


April 6, 2004 Chemical & Engineering News

PHOENIX MOVES FORWARD
Pemex seeks private-sector partners for ethylene cracker project
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8214/8214pemex.html

Pemex, Mexico's state oil company, is taking a step forward on its Phoenix Project to build a new ethylene cracker joint venture with partners from the private sector.


Garcia says the new ethylene cracker, to be located in either the Altamira or the Coatzacoalcos area of Mexico, will likely be based on condensate and produce about
1 million metric tons of ethylene, 500,000 metric tons of propylene, and 125,000 metric tons of C4 compounds to feed downstream polyethylene, polypropylene, and butadiene plants. Pemex hopes to begin construction in 2005 and start the plant up in 2009.


Business Mexico 2004

The New Phoenix
Mammoth petrochemical project promises rapid returns on semi-private investment
http://www.amcham.com.mx/publicaciones/business/julio/petrochemical.html

Mexico's hard-hit petrochemical industry is hoping that a new plan will reinvigorate the sector. The plan, known as Project Phoenix, aims to revive a neglected sector whose soaring imports bill is hitting the nation's economy increasingly hard. At least eight Mexican and international companies are seriously interested in taking part in Project Phoenix, a future chemicals complex, in what promises to be the largest industrial investment of the present administration at US$1.6 billion to US$2 billion. This will be the biggest investment in petrochemicals since the La Cangrejera and Morelos complexes were built in the 1980s,said Eduardo de la Tijera, CEO of Grupo Texne, a plastics and chemicals industries consulting firm.

An evolving idea

Pemex will supply the feedstock for the
crackerthat breaks it up into 1 to 1.2 million tons a year of ethylene, the building block from which a range of products is derived to meet the needs of the chemicals and plastics industries.
The feedstock could be ethane, a constituent of natural gas, or it could be naphta - also known as natural gasoline - which is currently exported by Pemex.

Lots of gas, no way to get it
Mexico has substantial reserves of gas - 15 trillion cubic feet - and much more in the
probablecategory, yet it lacks the financial resources to develop them, and the law forbids Pemex from granting concessions.