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Thai Caprolactam insists it is ready to meet growing environmental challenges, after registering the world’s first greenhouse gas reduction project for a caprolactam plant.
In addition to immediate risks from the business cycle and price fluctuations, the Thai petrochemical industry faces an inescapable challenge from global warming, said TCL vice-president Suriyon Vonpen.
“Definitely, global warming will become both the challenge and the threat of the industry in the future as [the production of] every petrochemical product releases carbon into the atmosphere,” he said.
“It is the global trend that we are going to face, for example, in the form of tariff barriers demanding petrochemical products cut emissions in their manufacturing processes.”
Producing caprolactam, which is used to manufacture nylon, emits nitrous oxide (N2O). So-called “Laughing Gas”, nitrous oxide generates 310 times more carbon than CO2 per tonne, said Mr Suriyon.
TCL, Southeast Asia’s only caprolactam manufacturer, emits about 500 tonnes of N2O with its annual production of 110,000 tonnes of caprolactam at its plant in Rayong.
In response to its environmental challenges, TCL has become a pioneer for the petrochemical industry in developing a greenhouse gas emission project under the global Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme that facilitates carbon trading.
Using 120 million baht in investment and technology transfer from Mitsubishi Corp, TCL aims to cut its emissions by more than 143,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, which could be traded in the form of certified emission reduction (CER) credits.
Mitsubishi will be responsible for trading the carbon credits, said Mr Suriyon.
The TCL project was registered by the United Nations on June 16 as the first such greenhouse gas reduction project for a caprolactam plant.
After more than two years of development, the project was approved by the Thailand Greenhouse Gas Management Organisation in February 2008.
TCL sees the CDM project as essential, even if the future of global carbon trading is uncertain after the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012.
The company has to shoulder an operating expense of about 10,000 baht a day even if the emission trading scheme is not continued after 2012 in the worst case, said Mr Suriyon.
TCL, which is 91% owned by Japan’s Ube Industries, expects its sales revenue to fall to 9.2 billion baht this year from 13 billion last year.
Since 2005, TCL’s reverse-osmosis system has recycled more than 700,000 cubic metres of water each year from its annual consumption of 3 million, to help alleviate water shortage in the eastern region of Thailand.
