After almost 80 years of history in Port Neches, the chemical plant that has been the premier upstream chemical producer for more than one company through the years has settled into its new role with Indorama Ventures.
Thailand-based Indorama Ventures wrapped up its $2 billion acquisition of the Port Neches plant and five other facilities from Huntsman Corp. last January.
Since then, staff and administration have completed a turnaround, started establishing what Indorama’s role in the community will be and adapted to a global pandemic all at once.
Chad Anderson, an 18-year veteran with the plant, is Indorama’s vice president of manufacturing and acting site director for the company’s new Gulf Coast assets. He said that has meant exploring where the facility fits with its new corporate family, but mostly it’s been capitalizing on what has come before.
“It’s a question of what you have to do right, and that falls down to being responsible and abiding by our environmental permits, keeping employees and clients happy and maintaining our civil engagement,” he said.
Changing hands
Under Huntsman, Port Neches was still a major focus in terms of products and resources, but that position was starting to make less sense as the company started to head toward making more specific and proprietary products directly for clients.
The basic building blocks for production created in Port Neches were still important for those products, but complete ownership of their production was quickly becoming less of priority.
“Due to the sheer volume, Port Neches became a crown site, but it was about as far upstream as you could get,” Anderson said.
The company started selling off base chemical production in 2007. It eventually started marketing its upstream production assets, the plants and units that made the most basic products usually sold at wholesale, as a package.
That’s where Indorama — one of the largest producers of consumer-level plastics and synthetic materials in the world — stepped in.
Indorama previously set an initiative in 2019 to increase its Integrated Oxides and Derivatives (IOD) segments, which not only meant an aggressive investment in some of the basic materials used in its products, but that companies like Huntsman would still be purchasing chemicals like propylene oxide for their own more specialized products.
“I see this as (Indorama’s) most strategic and ambitious deal as we set our goals and aspirations at the turn of this decade and as we groom ourselves into a global, diversified chemicals company with multiple integrated and related earning streams,” Aloke Lohia, group CEO of Indorama Ventures, said at the time of the deal’s closure.
Along with Port Neches, Indorama acquired plants in Dayton and Chocolate Bayou, as well as facilities in India and Australia. The Gulf Coast assets joined a plant that Indorama was already in the process of restarting in Lake Charles, Louisiana, after it lay dormant for 15 years.
Anderson said that the company had assets like the Lake Charles facility and its plant in Clear Lake that could make olefines and amines or oxides and glycol, but the new assets — and specifically Port Neches — offered the kind of scale and broad flexibility to meet changing demands while still making the kind of products that will always have a place in the market.
“It’s about who you want to be when you grow up,” Anderson said. “We have vertical integration and the ability to share technology and ideas to sell to the merchant market or grow the surfactants and amines lines.”
The Port Neches plant also still has the nation’s largest individual unit producing MTBE, a fuel additive banned in the United States but still exported to South American and Asian countries.
The Port Neches plant can make 1.6 billion pounds of MTBE every year and regularly sends shipments between 25,000 and 300,000 barrels overseas, according to the company.
The MTBE business was briefly disrupted in November 2019 after the neighboring TPC Group plant ignited in a months-long fire, which engulfed storage tanks at the TPC site used to store the product for Huntsman at the time.
Anderson said market demands for MTBE seem to be growing in Asia, but South America is still a major client for shipments of the additive, keeping the product high on the priority list going into the future.
“I see it as beginning to be even more important, especially as we see economies start to recover and fuel demand rises,” he said.
Local impacts
The sheer size of the Port Neches plant gives it an outsized role in Gulf Coast chemical production, but the same goes for its impact on local labor.
Anderson said that it currently employees about 600 direct employees across all departments, and retains 300 to 500 contractors at any given time.
Those hundreds of employees are represented by four local union chapters from the United Steelworkers Union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and Pipefitters Local 195.
Its relationship with Port Neches’ USW local is particularly critical after TPC Group’s layoffs that followed the November 2019 TPC explosion significantly reduced membership.
Indorama has been hiring since the turnaround more than a year ago, including some who departed neighboring TPC, but site manager Kim Hoyt said most of the team is still about the same.
Hoyt, who has spent more than 20 year at the site through multiple owners, said the retention through the ownership transition wasn’t that surprising, considering the plant’s connection with the community.
“This has always been the kind of place where the people that work here also live in the community,” she said.
The company estimated that the facility covered $127 million in local salaries and benefits in 2019.
She said that deep connection is why administrators are trying to carry over the community engagement and philanthropy people came to expect from staff at the facility when it was under a different name.
Workers got to contribute to the kind of aid the plant has rendered in the past during disasters in a different way during the global pandemic, personally converting units in the plant to produce hand sanitizer for distribution to schools and public facilities across the region.
Hoyt said it was a change of pace from the products they usually make, which are used in countless essential goods, but their origins in Port Neches are often lost along the way.
Anderson said the company moved about 30,000 gallons of the sanitizer during the early months of the pandemic and still has some in storage in case of a resurgence.
“It was really an amazing feat when you think about it,” he said. “There are many instances when we could produce a product like that in around two weeks. It was a spectacular use of resources for the good of the country.”
The facility has continued to retain an environmental steward to manage its 1,100 acres of natural habitat that has been used to foster wildlife such as the black mallard.
Growth
Anderson said one of the things that attracted Indorama to the Port Neches facility was its potential for growth.
The site has about 2,800 acres, 1,000 of which have already been developed. Space remains available for new units, namely toward the Groves and Port Arthur boundaries of the facility, if and when the company decides it’s needed.
That likelihood is apparently growing as Indorama continues to integrate its new and old properties.
Anderson said its facilities such as Dayton are able to meet the specialty needs of companies as their product bases and market demands change, but Port Neches is where Indorama will look when it sees a need to build capacity.
“We’ll be looking for downstream adjacency, and that usually comes from embracing innovations and understanding the businesses of buyers,” he said. “You want to be able to build something when you need it, and we have that option available here.”
jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com
twitter.com/jd_journalism
"port" - Google News
January 31, 2021 at 08:02PM
https://ift.tt/3j4ihKE
Indorama finds pace, community at Port Neches plant - Beaumont Enterprise
"port" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2VXul6u
https://ift.tt/2WmIhpL
