Serving the Teesside Business Community | 29
CRACKER BACKER
Tees Business co-editor Dave Allan talks to the man responsible for ensuring SABIC’ s industrial cornerstone, Olefins 6, continues to drive the Teesside economy
Teesside has had its fair share of Dutch influences. Architect Erick van Egeraat designed Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and the footballing talents of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Bolo Zenden and George Boateng were popular with Riverside Stadium regulars.
The latest arrival from the Netherlands to make a name for himself in our region, John Bruijnooge does his best to ignore the biting North-East wind as he proudly surveys the Teesside icon that is the Olefins 6 chemical plant.
Charged with helping to ensure the Teesside operations of global chemical giant SABIC are a financial success, the Dutchman knows the key to success is the recently completed radical upgrade to a plant known fondly by staff as simply‘ The Cracker’.
Dominating the skyline of the Wilton International site, near Redcar, the Cracker’ s intricate pipework and shining steel towers stand like the outsized creation of some mad Meccano addict, a monument to engineering and chemical ingenuity.
Built by ICI in 1979, back in the days when the one-time petrochemical colossus employed tens of thousands of the local population, more recently Olefins 6 was in danger of becoming no more than an antiquated museum piece, no longer able to compete with newer, state-of-the-art plants across Europe and beyond.
But since arriving on Teesside at the start of 2016, site director Bruijnooge has overseen the completion of an ambitious, exciting and transformational upgrade to a plant that converts raw materials – or feedstocks, as those in the know prefer to call them- into the building block chemicals that go into producing such everyday items as car interiors, food packaging and plastic cups.
Corporate sensitivities mean Bruijnooge can’ t reveal the exact amount of SABIC’ s investment in the upgrade to allow the Cracker’ s 17 furnaces to take cheaper US ethane as one of its key feedstocks. Suffice to say that to build a Cracker from new would cost an eye-watering £ 1.35 billion and each of the plant’ s maintenance shutdowns represent a £ 50 million commitment by the Saudi-owned company.
After some troubled times, during which the company shed more than 100 jobs from its Teesside operations, the upgrade