SINGAPORE (Bloomberg) -- Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s biggest investor-owned oil company, said it will build a second chemicals facility in Singapore to meet rising demand in Asia.

The plant costing “several billion dollars” will start up in 2011, Eva Ho, a Singapore-based spokeswoman, said by phone yesterday. At the heart of the new facility is a so-called cracker, which processes naphtha, an oil product, into one million metric tons a year of ethylene, a raw material for making plastics, and higher-priced products including polyethylene and polypropylene.
Exxon’s expansion in Asia’s biggest oil-trading center underscores expectations that growth in the region will account for 60 percent of the gain in global petrochemicals consumption over the next decade. Economic growth and exports to the U.S. have boosted sales of electronics, flat-panel monitors, and auto parts made from plastics.
“In terms of cracker projects, the timing is crucial,” Samuel Liew, an analyst at consultant Chemical Market Associates Inc., said in Singapore. “The new cracker will begin operations in time to capture the next peak in the petrochemical cycle.”
Exxon in March completed an expansion of its first chemicals facility in Singapore. The work boosted the plant’s annual ethylene capacity by 75,000 tons to more than 900,000 tons, the company said March 23.
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The second plant will include two 650,000 tons-a-year polyethylene units, a 450,000 tons-a-year polypropylene unit, a 300,000 tons-a-year elastomers unit and an aromatics extraction unit to produce 340,000 tons a year of benzene, Exxon said. An oxo-alcohol unit will be expanded by 125,000 tons a year, and a paraxylene unit by 80,000 tons.
The project includes a 200-megawatt co-generation power plant, the company said. Ground-breaking for the second facility will take place towards the end of this year, Ho said by telephone.
Exxon’s new cracker is among Asia’s largest, Chemical Market’s Liew said. The new cracker will be Singapore’s fifth, boosting the country’s total ethylene capacity by 36 percent to 3.8 million tons a year by 2011. Exporters in the city-state compete with rivals from Taiwan and South Korea.
Formosa Petrochemical Corp. started ethylene production in May from a 1.2 million tons-a-year facility in Taiwan. Samsung Total Petrochemicals Co. on June 3 resumed output from a cracker in South Korea after expanding the facility by 30 percent to 850,000 tons a year.
Polyethylene and polypropylene are raw materials for making grocery bags, plastic water bottles, and automobile headlights, and bumpers. The second cracker and linked plants will be integrated with Exxon’s existing 605,000 barrels-a-day refinery and petrochemicals complex on Jurong Island