Status and future development suggestions for China’spolyolefin industry

In this paper, the development trends of the polyolefin industry at home and abroad are summarized, the challenges and bottlenecks encountered by China’s polyolefin industry for development are analyzed, and some proposals are made from the perspectives of technological creation and research mechanism innovation. While China’s polyolefin industry enjoys the advantage of the largest scale with facilities practicing the most varieties of process technologies for the most diversified feedstocks in the world, also some crucial issues are obvious such as weak international competitiveness and structural contradictions. The reasons are expounded. Firstly, activities in both basic research and applied research are insufficient to initiate breakthroughs in technological innovation with originality. Secondly, inadequate pilot-scale research platforms constrain the speed of translation from bench-scale achievement to industrialization. Thirdly, the technical barrier in engineering, equipment manufacturing, and industrial norms and standards restrict the autonomy and the risk control of the industrial manufacturing of high-end products. Finally, the dependency on the import of crude oil leads to the uncontrollable cost of olefin feedstocks. Some proposals are made to improve the current situation of the polyolefin industry. To achieve technological leadership in the polyolefin industry, areas of breakthrough are identified for research and innovation, which include feedstock and key monomers, high performance catalysts, advanced polymerization process and engineering, high-end product development, innovation in processing technology, product applications and recycled utilization of polyolefin waste for sustainability. To improve the mechanism for research and innovation, the seamless collaboration of “industry-university-research-application” should be encouraged and deepened to carry out fundamental and theoretical researches on polymer physics and chemistry for the advancement in key scientific and technological aspects including catalyst, reaction engineering, process intensification, processing and application. Meanwhile, it is critical to formulate the norms and standards for pilot plant test for the breakthrough of the barrier from bench-scale test to industrialization. In the end, innovation throughout the whole industrial chain is essential to the development of innovative polyolefin package technology with originality, the transformation of polyolefin products to a green future with higher performance and more functionalities and intelligent features, and the high-quality development of China’s polyolefin industry at large.