China's Zhejiang Yisheng Petrochemical started up its new 1.5m tonne/year purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant in Ningbo on Tuesday, a company source said.
"We started to feed in feedstock paraxylene (PX) today, and so far the start-up process goes well," said the source.
He did not know when the company would reach on-spec production of PTA.
Although the facility has a nameplate capacity of 1.5m tonnes/year it could actually produce up to 1.8m tonnes/year of PTA, the source said.
The facility is the company's third PTA plant at Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang province. Yisheng operates two 650,000 tonne/year PTA units at the same site.
Feeding PX is regarded as the symbol of a formal start-up, a PTA technical specialist said.
"The next milestone should be on-spec production, but the process could take one week to a month depending on the facility, technology and personnel," the specialist added.
