Year in Review: 2024 was a great year for local industry
December 26, 2024
ExxonMobil, the oil and gas giant with over a century of roots in Baytown, kept the scribes busy in 2024 trying to keep up with its latest announcements.
Advanced recycling, carbon capture and storage, clean hydrogen production, even power plants for data centers made headlines for the company with Humble (Oil) beginnings.
But there was incredible commerce taking place around the entire area.
The takeover of Covestro by ADNOC, short for Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, will give the Baytown plant its fifth name in a little over 50 years. That name will be XRG, which is a rebranding by ADNOC as the company strives to become a top five global chemicals player.
The deal was declared final late last week with XRG having acquired 91.3% of all outstanding shares of Covestro in a $15 billion transaction, according to Reuters.
The Baytown site, with 1,100 employees, is the third-largest production site for Covestro, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high-quality polymers materials.
While Baytown’s Chevron Phillips Chemical was ranked as the No. 1 supplier of high-density polyethylene in a customer satisfaction survey that included Dow, INEOS, LyondellBassell and Shell Polymers, Mont Belvieu midstreamers were booming in a period of exploding demand for natural gas liquids ethane, butane and propane.
ExxonMobil’s Mont Belvieu Plastics Plant is one of the largest polyethylene manufacturers in the world, pumping out approximately 5 billion pounds of polyethylene products each year that are shipped around the world to make thousands of everyday products.
Energy Transfer surpassed single day fractionation records and began construction on its ninth fractionator unit in Mont Belvieu.
This will bring its total fractionation capacity to over 1.3 million barrels per day and is expected to be in service by the end of 2026.
Fractionators separate the hydrocarbon strings into their components. Energy Transfer, ONEOK, Targa Resources and Enterprise Products are among the largest companies that own fractionators at the pipeline hubs.
ONEOK completed MB-6, a 125,000 barrel per day natural gas liquids fractionator in Mont Belvieu, in early December. It increases the company’s fractionation capacity to more than 1 million barrels per day.Completion of “full looping” of ONEOK’s West Texas NGL pipeline system expands capacity to 515,000 bpd, with additional pump stations are expected to add 50% more capacity when they’re completed in mid-2025.
Enterprise Products is building its 13th fractionator in Mont Belvieu, named Frac Fourteen. It is expected to turn out 195,000 bpd when complete.Enterprise completed the largest planned turnaround in company history in 2024, with more than 200 employees and contractors logging more than 1.5 million man-hours without a single lost-time accident.
Targa has committed to building its 11th fractionator, having just started up No. 9 with a 10th underway.
“We are continuing to grow,” Targa area manager Ted Keller said in a statement that could have been made by all area petrochemical companies, “and that means many more jobs.”
ExxonMobil executed the largest offshore carbon dioxide storage lease in the United States in October. The deal with the Texas General Land Office was for 271,000 acres of submerged state land located in the Gulf of Mexico in Jefferson, Chambers and Galveston counties.
Terms of the lease were withheld by ExxonMobil and the GLO.
It will be the second carbon sequestration deal announced for Chambers County, coming after Bayou Bend, a joint venture headed by Chevron USA that will encompass 100,000 on-land acres in east Chambers and west Jefferson counties.
Meanwhile, TGS Cedar Port Partners and pipeline giant Kinder Morgan executed a lease agreement for 10,800 acres directly underneath Cedar Port with a total storage capacity of 300 million tons.
ExxonMobil announced plans to expand its advanced recycling plants in Baytown and Beaumont with $200 million of new spending that will more than double current capacity to 500 million pounds a year.
Advanced recycling transforms plastic waste into new materials that can be used to make many other products.
ExxonMobil expects its low-carbon hydrogen facility in Baytown to be one of the world’s largest, producing up to 1 billion cubic feet of virtually carbon-free hydrogen per day with about 98% of the CO2 captured and stored.
Some of the hydrogen will be used to produce over a million metric tons per year of low-carbon ammonia. The company is eyeing a final investment decision in 2025 with the potential to start operations in 2029.
ADNOC, Mitsubishi and Air Liquide have all signed on to partner with ExxonMobil on the plant. The go or no-go decision on the plant is subjective to supportive government policy and necessary regulatory permits.
All eyes will be on Washington as Donald Trump returns to the U.S. Presidency. Tax credits for clean fuels were a part of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but Trump has dismissed the IRA as the “Green New Scam” and Republicans on Capitol Hill are keen to cut climate spending to offset the cost of extending tax cuts from Trump’s first term.