On January 11, Shenghong Sierbang Petrochemical's 100,000-tonne/year nitrile rubber latext project successfully produced qualified products, marking a successful start-up on the first attempt. The project adopts industry-leading technology to produce high-end medical-grade nitrile latext with Shenghong Petrochemical's self-produced basic raw materials. It is another successful practice of innovation to create a circular economy and the high-end, diversified and refined development of the industry.
Nitrile latex is a high-end new material made of butadiene and acrylonitrile by special copolymerisation. The nitrile rubber materials manufactured by it are oil-resistant, wear-resistant, heat-resistant, and extremely airtight. They are widely used in the field of medical protection, especially suitable for making disposable medical gloves. Various other oil-resistant rubber products made of nitrile copolymers, such as oil-resistant gaskets, gaskets, cable adhesive materials, etc., have also become indispensable standard elastic materials in many high-tech fields such as automobiles, aerospace and petroleum. Moreover, nitrile latex can also be degraded or recycled under appropriate conditions, making it an excellent green substitute for natural latex.
In recent years, affected by the rapid development of the medical and health care industry, the market demand for nitrile latext has increased rapidly. According to the data, the global market size of nitrile gloves in 2022 will be 34.784 billion yuan (RMB), and it is expected to reach 69.336 billion yuan by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 12%. However, due to the difficulty of preparing high-end nitrile latex, the number of factories that can produced it in China is relatively small, and the market's external dependence has been at a high level for a long time.
As a firm explorer and practitioner of the new petrochemical industry, Shenghong Petrochemical empowers industrial innovation and development with science and technology. By creating a circular economy with efficient upstream and downstream connections, it strives to build a world-class new energy new materials industry cluster and help build a powerful materials nation. The construction and commissioning of the 100,000-tonne/year nitrile latext project will vigorously fill the domestic gap in the high-end nitrile latex market, which is not only in line with Shenghong Petrochemical's strategic positioning of closely following national industrial policy, leading regional development and serving social needs, but also in line with the group's high-quality development needs for optimizing the structure, improving the industrial chain and improving the value chain.
It is reported that since the main raw materials of butadiene and acrylonitrile come from the upstream industrial chain of the group, the project has significant advantages in terms of product quality and cost control. At the same time, through breakthrough innovation in technology and process, the conversion rate of the polymerization reaction process of the project has reached more than 96%, and the latex index of the nitrile latex products produced far exceeds the national standard. It is used for the processing of disposable medical gloves, and all mechanical indicators have reached the world's advanced level. It is worth mentioning that with the successful commissioning of the fourth set of Sierbang Petrochemical acrylonitrile units in December 2023, Shenghong Petrochemical's acrylonitrile production capacity has reached 1.04 million tonnes/year, creating the world's largest acrylonitrile production base, and providing sufficient raw material guarantee for the downstream development of the high-end deep processing industry chain.
