Taking another crucial step towards realising its new integrated petrochemical hub in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, RusVinyl (Nizhny Novgorod; www.rusvinyl.ru) in mid-June signed a EUR 750m multifacility loan agreement. The group – a 50:50 joint venture between SolVin (Brussels / Belgium; www.solvinpvc.com) and Siberian-Ural Petrochemical (Sibur, Moscow / Russia; www.sibur.ru) – had laid the foundation stone for the 330,000 t/y PVC and 235,000 t/y caustic soda facility in the summer of last year – see Plasteurope.com of 22.07.2010. The loan extends up to 12.5 years and was provided by a group of banks, including Russia’s Sberbank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, BNP Paribas, ING Bank and HSBC.

Scheduled for commissioning in 2013, RusVinyl says the plant’s piling and concrete laying has almost been completed and that large-scale equipment is ready to be delivered to the site. Parent company SolVin will provide the plant’s PVC technology license, while French engineering group Technip (Paris; www.technip.com) is managing the facility’s design, procurement and construction. Russia’s OJSC Globalstroy-Engineering (Moscow; www.globse.com) acts as construction contractor, while France’s Air Liquide (Paris; www.airliquide.fr) has been tasked with building an air separation plant and the supply of oxygen, nitrogen and dry compressed air. All in all, present project costs have been fixed at RUR 48 bn (about EUR 1.2 bn).

Once finished, the plant will produce high-quality suspension and emulsion PVC, and RusVinyl has already touted plans to raise output successively to up to 500,000 t/y of PVC by 2016. Explaining the rationale behind the new hub, RusVinyl said: “The project is oriented to produce a unique range of PVC resins not currently offered on the Russian market and will considerably decrease imports of this polymer.”