Plans afoot to upgrade Jurong Island facilities

Aim is to maintain Singapore's energy, chemicals hub lead
Ronnie Lim, Business Times 20 May 10;

FOLLOWING Jurong Island's successful development as an internationally-competitive, integrated petrochemicals hub, Singapore will be embarking on a 'Jurong Island version 2.0' upgrade to maintain this lead, Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang said yesterday.

Mr Lim, who officiated at the ground-breaking for Lanxess' 400 million euro (S$685 million) second-generation synthetic rubber plant, said that this new initiative, involving inputs from industry, 'will focus on areas such as system-level energy efficiency solutions and new competitive feedstock and logistics options'.

The 'version 2.0' initiative will also look into optimising the use of valuable resources such as energy, land and water, in addition to the 'plug-and-play' infrastructure such as feedstocks, logistics and utilities that it already offers investors. It is aimed at helping Singapore maintain its position as a leading global energy and chemicals hub, he stressed.

Speaking to BT on the sidelines of the Lanxess event, Heah Soon Poh, JTC Corporation director (Biomedical and Chemicals), said that JTC will be discussing with industry players regarding both their needs, as well as their participation, in the latest initiative.

'The whole idea is to strengthen Jurong Island's two pillars of its sustainability (like offering investors a superior workforce) and competitiveness,' he said.

To support this, JTC will later be rolling out various sub-initiatives covering areas like energy, water, alternative energy, and logistics and transport.

One example of what can be done with energy, said Mr Heah, will be to look at how to tap unused 'cold' energy from the liquefied natural gas receiving terminal being built here, he added.

As for new competitive feedstock, BT recently reported that Shell Chemicals is, for instance, already at an advanced planning stage for a world-scale high-purity ethylene oxide plant on Jurong Island - with this potentially drawing in downstream players such as detergent plants to a new 'high-purity' chemicals corridor here.

This follows the recent start-up of Shell's new US$3 billion petrochemical complex here, with a downstream mono-ethylene glycol plant offering materials for such a project.

Asked about this, Julian Ho, Economic Development Board's assistant managing director, confirmed that Singapore is talking with investors worldwide regarding investment in the 'high purity' chemicals corridor.

Mr Lim, in his speech, said that with the chemicals sector contributing about one-third of Singapore's total manufacturing output last year, the government wants to focus on growing the specialty chemicals sector which contributes over half the chemical cluster's total value-add.

This is crucial given that Singapore is located in a region with fast-growing demand for more specialty and higher value chemicals and polymers, he said.