Reliance commissions two chemical plants in Gujarat

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) on Friday said it has commissioned two chemical plants with a total capacity of 650 kilo tonnes per annum to produce PET resin to be used for water packaging, carbonated soft drinks, pharmaceuticals and other foods and beverages.

"The plant has been built with Invista Technology for Continuous Polymerization and Buhler AG Technology for Solid State Polymerization... This is one of the largest bottle-grade PET (Purified Terephthalic Acid) resin capacity at a single location globally," the company said in a statement.

The commissioning of this plant increases the company's global capacity to produce 1.15 MMTPA of PTA resin.

PTA and Mono Ethylene Glycol - the two feedstocks for the new PET resin plant are available within the Dahej complex as the company also commissioned the 1150 KTA Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) plant on April 10 in the same complex.

"This offers significant logistics advantages in the form of lower freight costs along with consistent product quality due to in-house raw material linkages", it said.

India is one of the fastest growing markets for PET packaging with demand growing by 15-20 percent annually.