SEPC - Nguang-Yong Chiew , General Manager Shell manufacturing site on Jurong Island
Hello, my name is N.Y. Chew.
I’m the General Manager of Shell’s Manufacturing Site here in Jurong Island, Singapore.
We’re standing right here in the middle of our Shell’s latest site that is built
and constructed and started up in November 2009.
This is the mono-ethylene glycol plant.
It’s a world-scale manufacturing site and it produces 750,000 tonnes of MEG every year.
Down in PulauBukom there’s our Shell’s refinery in Singapore
and it’s connected by submarine pipeline from PulauBukom Refinery through another island
back into the plant here in Shell Jurong Island.
What we manufacture here, in a MEG plant, is mono-ethylene glycol.
This is the feedstock that goes into making a lot of our everyday products.
It includes the polyester fibres that go into most of our shirts.
The chemicals that goes into the PET bottles that we use everyday in the drinking bottles.
The capacity of the plant here you can see is actually 750,000 tonnes a year.
It is actually a world-scale plant. Put that in context,
you can actually make 6.7 billion shirts out of our annual production,
that’s actually more than the population of the world today.
Having said that, let me just give a quick run through on how we manufacture the mono-ethylene glycol here in the plant.
It starts off with our feed-stock from our Bukom refinery,
the ethylene cracker, via the submarine pipeline comes to here.
The ethylene comes into the plant. It is combined with oxygen to form ethylene oxide.
Ethylene oxide is manufactured in this part of the plant
and is next combined with water and together to form our mono-ethylene glycol.
It is here before it’s actually transported out of the site.
Let me describe something that is different here that is different from the PulauBukom refinery,
as well as the other sites in Shell’s Jurong, in Singapore.
One of the major differences is the use of closed-loop cooling water system.
We use cooling towers to actually cool down the water that goes around the site.
We like to cool down the processes. In other plants we typically use either seawater or we use river water,
or other brackish water and with this process we are able to reduce our energy usage and at the same time,
utilise something that is an important resource for the world, that is water.
The other important aspect of the design in the MEG plant here is we actually utilise an OMEGA Technology.
This is the first in the Shell World where we actually use a new technology
to be able to help us extract more in terms of the yield of the product.
Typical plants using the older technology can only produce 1.5 – 1.6 tonnes of MEG per tonne of ethylene through input.
By using OMEGA technology, we’re able to bring up the figure to 1.9 tonnes of MEG produced
pertonne of ethylene that is actually used as a feedstock. We believe this is a breakthrough technology.
We believe it’s the best way that we can actually use to help us, at the same time we start improving the yield,
we can actually improve also the energy you save and I’m looking forward and confident that moving forward,
we will be able to help Shell secure a more competitive advantage in the market
and able to deliver quality products to our customers at the right price, right quantity,
right quality and the moment they need it.