BASF Building New Acrylic Plant in Brazil
by Charles W. Thurston
Latin America Correspondent
thurstoncw@rodpub.com
Production cost of
BASF’s Suvinil paint
line to drop.
BASF has finally broken ground on a new acrylic acid production complex at Brazil’s Camacari, Bahia state petrochemical complex, with plans to replace imported products going into latex paints and
other downstream products, and to begin exports by 2014.
With a planned investment of $660 million,
the acrylic acid complex will be the first of its
kind in Latin America, and the largest investment by the company in the region thus far,
BASF claims. Camacari is an industrial area near
the state capital of Salvador.
BASF will also use its proprietary technology
to produce butyl acrylate and superabsorbent
polymers from propylene feedstock provided by
Braskem, which is upgrading its facility at Camacari to serve BASF requirements. BASF also
will use acrylic acid from Camacari to begin
production of 2-ethyl-hexyl acrylate by 2015, a
raw material for adhesives and special coatings,
at its existing factory in Guaratinguetá, São
Paulo state, also to be the first such production
in the region. Braskem is said to be the largest
petrochemical in Latin America in terms of production capacity and the fifth-largest petrochemical producer globally.
The investment should reduce the production
cost of Suvinil, BASF’s premium architectural paint
line in Brazil. The company claims a 60 percent
market share for the premium sub-segment of ar-
chitectural paints in Brazil. The Camacari produc-
tion will supplant some $200 million in Brazilian
chemical imports, and add $100 million in ex-
ports, the company calculates. BASF currently ex-
ports some products from Brazil to neighboring
Bolivia and Paraguay, to Venezuela and Cuba in
the north, and to several countries in Africa.
58 | Coatings World
www.coatingsworld.com
April 2012
