News of the news network recently stated that Russia's Gazprom announced that they have been moving ahead with a project with their partners to produce chemicals from natural gas in Ustroga, near St. Petersburg, Russia. The parties involved have invested billions of dollars in this effort, and the products will be exported. The first batch of the new facilities are scheduled to go into service in the fourth quarter of 2023, and other batches scheduled to go into service in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Gazprom said it would build an upstream comprehensive plant for gas-processing and liquefaction in Ustroga that would process gas containing ethane and be the main project for a major gas-processing and chemical cluster in the region. The parties have agreed on the basic design and are in the process of drafting a design document, and site clearance is in progress as well.

It was said that the comprehensive plant would be capable of handling 45 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, produce about 13 million tons of liquefied natural gas, 3.8 million tons of ethane, 2.4 million tons of liquefied petroleum gas and 200,000 tons of N-pentane fractions. The remaining 19 billion cubic meters per year will go directly into Gazprom's natural gas transmission system. The ethane produced will be used as the raw material for the new chemical plants to produce 3 million tons/year of several grades of polyethylene (PE) resin.