Butene-1 has a wide range of applications and market demand is constantly being released

Butene-1 is one of the isomers of butene. At normal temperature and pressure, butene-1 is a colorless, flammable gas that is soluble in water and can be used as an anesthetic at high concentrations. According to different product purity, butene-1 can be divided into purity 99.3% and purity 99.0%. As an important basic chemical raw material, butene-1 can be used to produce LLDPE, HDPE, poly-1-butene, dodecene, 1-octene, butyl mercaptan, n-butyl oxide, sec-butanol, etc. A variety of products, the downstream applications involve packaging, medicine, pesticides, wires and cables, films and other fields.

Butene-1 mainly includes two production routes: the dimerization process using ethylene as raw material and the separation process using C4 fraction as raw material. Butene-1 in my country is mainly produced by the C4 separation process. my country’s butene-1 industry research started in the 1990s. After years of development and accumulation, the scale of my country’s butene-1 industry has continued to expand. In 2020, my country’s butene-1 production reached about 670,000 tons, and the consumption was about 700,000 tons. At present, there is still a certain supply gap in my country’s butene-1 market, and the supply channel for the gap is to import products from South Korea, Qatar, India and other countries.

According to the “2022-2027 China Butene-1 Industry Market In-depth Research and Development Prospects Forecast Report released by the Industrial Research Center , Globally, the butene-1 market is mainly concentrated in North America, China and the Middle East. In 2020, the total global butene-1 production capacity is about 3 million tons, and the production capacity mainly comes from ethylene cracking units. Thanks to the release of downstream market demand, global butene-1 production capacity will continue to grow in the next three years, and is expected to reach 3.52 million tons in 2024.

In the international market, butene-1 suppliers mainly include Sabic, Evonik of Germany, Iran NPC, TPC Group of the United States, Exxon Mobil, Sumitomo Chemical and other companies; in the domestic market, Sinopec and PetroChina are butene-1 1 Main manufacturing enterprises, other enterprises such as Sinochem Quanzhou, Henan Longrun Tianxiang Chemical, Feihong Chemical, Shenhua Group, etc. also occupy a certain market share. With the improvement of production technology, my country’s butene-1 industrial structure is continuously optimized, and product quality and economic benefits have also been improved to a certain extent.

From the perspective of downstream application scale, due to factors such as raw material sources and technology, LLDPE and HDPE are the main consumption scenarios of butene-1 in my country, followed by poly-1-butene. However, in the international market, developed countries mostly use high-carbon α-olefins such as 1-hexene, 1-octene, etc. to replace butene-1 as a comonomer. The proportion of butene-1 as a comonomer has dropped to 30 %the following.

Industry analysts said that butene-1 is an important basic chemical material that can be used to produce a variety of chemical products. In recent years In recent years, with the continued release of downstream market demand, my country’s butene-1 industry has developed rapidly. While the scale of the butene-1 industry has expanded, the industrial structure has also been continuously optimized. From the perspective of production technology, butene-1 in my country is mainly produced by the C4 separation process, while in the international market, butene-1 production capacity mainly comes from ethylene cracking units.