Several crude oil-to-chemical (COTC) projects being planned or started in Asia and Saudi Arabia threaten to reshape the global petrochemical industry in the coming years. COTCs configure a refinery to produce maximum chemicals instead of traditional transportation fuels. Since refinery processing capacity is approximately 10 times higher than the current world-scale petrochemical plants, COTC in effect raises petrochemical production to an unprecedented refinery scale.
COTCs also produce at least twice as much chemical volume per barrel of oil as a state-of-art, well-integrated, refinery-petrochemical complex. Under the current industry structure, a refinery provides naphtha to a