Kick-off meeting for the engineering design of the 400,000-ton/year POE plant under the High-End New Materials Project of Zhejiang Petrochemical Co., Ltd

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On June 25, the kick-off meeting for the engineering design of the 400,000-ton/year POE plant for Zhejiang Petrochemical Co., Ltd.’s high-end new materials project – a project for which the process package was provided by Zhejiang Zhiying Petrochemical Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Zhejiang Ruizhi Holding Group Co., Ltd., and the engineering design was carried out by Shanghai Zhiying Chemical Technology Co., Ltd. – was successfully held in Hangzhou. Attendees of this meeting included relevant leaders and professional technical staff from the New Materials Division of the owner company, Zhejiang Petrochemical Co., Ltd., as well as relevant leaders and team leaders for various specialties, product managers, and other management, engineering, and technical personnel from Shanghai Zhiying and Zhejiang Zhiying. The facility utilizes the POE integrated process technology developed by Zhejiang Zhiying in collaboration with universities; this technology is protected by independent intellectual property rights. It has overcome numerous critical technical challenges. Thanks to the highly efficient Vemetsol™ metallocene catalyst, Zyneson™ cocatalyst technology, as well as high-performance reactors and devolatilization systems, a unique ZoneFlex™ solution polymerization process has been established. Building upon preliminary lab-scale tests and a thousand-ton pilot plant, a complete process technology capable of producing 100,000 tons per production line has been successfully developed. With the commissioning of Zhejiang Petrochemical’s 400,000 tons per year POE production facility, China’s self-sufficiency rate in high-end polyolefin materials will be significantly improved. This will provide stable, high-performance material support for industries such as photovoltaic film, automotive, construction, electronics, and communications, thereby helping to upgrade China’s polyolefin industry. In recent years, **a series of policies have been introduced to support research and development in new materials technologies; high-end polyolefin materials have been listed as a key area for breakthrough in the “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the New Materials Industry”.** Zhejiang Zhiying actively responded to the call, collaborating with universities to promote collaborative innovation among industry, academia, and research. It overcame the key technical challenges related to α-olefin technology and polyolefin elastomer (POE) technology, thereby contributing to the industrialization of high-end polyolefin materials. On August 21, 2024, Zhiying’s thousand-ton-class α-olefin pilot plant began operating continuously and successfully produced qualified 1-octene products. Tests have shown that all the performance indicators of this product are at the leading level in the industry, representing another significant technical breakthrough following the successful development of 1-hexene. On September 6, 2024, the pilot plant for producing thousand-ton quantities of polyolefin elastomer (POE) at Zhiying was successfully operated through its entire process chain. The reaction system, static devolatilization system, and pelletizing system were jointly commissioned for the first time, resulting in the production of qualified POE products on the same day. This marks another solid step forward in the company’s development of complete sets of technologies in the field of advanced chemical polymer materials. On December 7, 2024, the process technology for the 200,000-ton/year POE project at Jintang New Materials by Rongsheng New Materials (Zhoushan) Co., Ltd., developed under the leadership of Zhejiang Zhiying R&D Center and engineered by Shanghai Zhiying Engineering Design, successfully passed the “First Domestic Demonstration Meeting on Process Safety and Reliability” organized by the Zhejiang Chemical Safety Association. On March 19, 2025, a demonstration meeting to evaluate the pilot-scale results of the \"technology for the selective oligomerization of ethylene to produce α-olefins\" and the \"POE technology for producing ethylene-α-olefin copolymer elastomers via solution method\", developed by Zhejiang Zhiying in collaboration with various universities, was successfully held in Hangzhou. The evaluation panel unanimously agreed that this set of technical processes is mature and features advanced performance, meeting the conditions for industrialization, and approved its technical appraisal. This laid a solid technical foundation for the design and commencement of this large-scale POE installation.