Plants will be co-located along the U.S. Gulf Coast with annual PET capacity at 1 million metric tons. 

The M&G Group, the largest producer of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) for packaging applications in the Americas, announced that it will build a next generation technology plant in the United States, co-located and fully integrated with a new purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant at the same site. PTA is the primary raw material used in the production of PET. Approximately 250 jobs will be created at the plants, with an additional 700 indirect positions and 3,000 jobs during construction.  

The new PET single-line plant will have a capacity of approximately 2.2 billion lbs/year. The PTA plant will be the largest in the Americas and among the largest in the world.

Final candidates for site selection are locations in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. A final selection is expected to be announced by the end of June. Construction time for both plants is estimated to be 30 months.

“The technological breakthrough of scaling up M&G’s proprietary technology to a one million metric ton single reactor has been available to us since the year 2007 when our investment plans were delayed by the financial crisis,” says Marco Ghisolfi, CEO of M&G’s Polymers Business Unit.  “As a result of demand growth fully recovering in 2010 and of several plants in North America having closed or been sold over the past few years, the industry supply/demand balance has now been restored, creating room in the market for our new plant.

“Our PET technology, which allows us to build plants over four times larger than those achievable with commercially available technologies, can today be combined with PTA plants with matching sizes and efficiency. This formidable combination, and the flexibility of its assets, will enable M&G to cost effectively service future industry growth and to have by far the most competitive cost base not only in the Americas but globally.”