The nation's largest oil refiner Sinopec yesterday began work on a 14.6-billion-yuan ethylene plant in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, to meet demand in the central region.

"The plant, the first large-scale refining and chemical production base in Central China, with a production capacity of 80,000 tons of ethylene per year, will change the structure of the nation's ethylene industry," said a Sinopec source, who declined to be named.

"There's only one small ethylene project in Central China at the moment. The new project should be ready by 2010 and will fill the gap in the region," he said.

Sinopec plans to build 3 million tons of annual ethylene capacity in the Yangtze River Delta in the east, Bohai Bay in the north and the Pearl River region in the south by 2010, its parent China Petrochemical Corp said in a statement.

That would cover more than 60 percent of the nation's ethylene production capacity, the statement said.

The new Wuhan ethylene project will help tap rising demand for the chemical and expand projects in the eastern and central regions, Sinopec said yesterday.

"The project will also help to enhance the oil refining and petrochemical downstream industry in the central region," the source said. "To ensure supply, Sinopec has doubled its oil refining capacity to 800 million tons."

The refiner invested 400 million yuan in pollution-control equipment for the new plant after it was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in April.

"We adopted the most advanced and the latest technologies to meet the government's energy saving and emission-reduction requirements," the source said.

"Environmental protection and energy saving are priorities for the nation and we wouldn't have been approved by the NDRC if the project hadn't met their requirements."

Sinopec said the project would provide 50,000 new jobs.

(China Daily December 19, 2007)