The port of Antwerp is the largest and most diversified petrochemical centre in Europe. No fewer than seven of the ten largest chemical companies in the world have one or more production sites within the Antwerp petrochemical cluster. Nowhere in the world are more chemical substances produced than in the Antwerp port area. Thanks to the Antwerp Integrated Model, there is a degree of integration between the various producing companies that is not found anywhere else.
The basis of this cluster is formed by five refineries: three smaller, specialist facilities owned by Petroplus and two world-class refineries (Total and ExxonMobil). These five refineries between them have a primary distillation capacity of more than 40 million tonnes annually. Some of the crude oil is brought in by ship and barge. However, the two large refineries are connected to the Rotterdam-Antwerp Pipeline (RAPL). As its name implies, the RAPL connects the port of Antwerp with the port of Rotterdam, ensuring a constant supply of crude oil for the large refineries.
The next step in the further downstream integration is represented by the four crackers, which crack the naphtha from the refineries into basic components for the petrochemical industry such as ethylene and propylene. Three of these crackers are located on the site of Fina Antwerp Olefines, a joint venture between the two large refineries. A fourth naphtha cracker is located on BASF’s “Verbund” (integrated production) site. In turn the basic substances produced by the crackers are further processed within the cluster.
The companies in the Antwerp petrochemical cluster are interconnected by more than 100 pipelines that account for 52% of all transport between them and also between the industrial operations and the independent tank storage companies. The five pipeline tunnels connecting the right and left banks of the Scheldt ensure that substances produced locally (such as chlorine, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen) can be distributed within the port via the extensive network.