A Japanese consortium made up of JGC Corporation, Itochu Corporation, Nissho Iwai Corporation, and Marubeni Chemical Plant Co., Ltd. has won a contract from Turkmenneftegas State Trade Corporation, Turkmenistan's state-owned petroleum and gas corporation, to construct a polypropylene plant, utility and other infrastructure facilities.

This is the largest ever project in Turkmenistan to be handled by a Japanese enterprise. Located in Turkmenbashi, a port town on the Caspian Sea, some 500 km west of the country's capital of Ashhabad, this project is to be executed under a lump-sum, full turnkey contract including design, materials/equipment procurement, construction, and test run.

This project is designed to produce polypropylene by recovering the propylene available from the Turkmenbashi Refinery. The project is divided into process units and offsite/utility facilities. The former include a 90,000-ton-per-year polypropylene plant (licensed by Montell), propylene recovery unit (licensed by UOP), hydrogen purification unit, product storage facilities and product packaging facilities. The latter cover a sea water desalination plant, nitrogen unit, propylene/LPG storage and shipping facilities, including a tie-in with the existing petroleum refining facilities.

Rich in natural gas and petroleum resources, Turkmenistan is achieving a steady economic growth as the second largest natural gas producing country, following Russia, among the CIS nations. (The country's estimated natural gas reserves are 106 trillion cubic feet, ranking fourth in the world.) However, the problem is that the only available means of transporting the product to foreign countries is by pipelines. In this project, polypropylene in solid form, as the product, enables exportation without depending on pipelines. In order to achieve improved income from such overseas sales, an early realization of this project has been sought by Turkmenistan.