World-Class Businesses mark milestones are re-branded Saltend Chemicals Park

A cluster of world-class businesses have marked key milestones in the development of the Humber region’s leading site for chemicals and renewable energy.

Saltend Chemicals Park has seen investment of £500 million over the past five years to become one of the region’s largest industrial sites and is now being promoted as a key location for further inward investment.

What is still often referred to as “BP at Saltend” is now a multi-operator site, with businesses sharing infrastructure, facilities and utilities at one of only two such chemicals parks in the UK.

BP retains a strong presence with two chemicals plants and the company’s global research hub, the Hull Research and Technology Centre (HRTC), but it now shares the 370-acre site with a clutch of multinational operators. In all, 1,000 people work at Saltend, on the eastern edge of Hull, which is thriving and has capacity for further development.

Saltend Chemicals Park is now promoting the transformation that has taken place, with the installation of a totem-style sign on a prime position at the front of the site. It carries the logos of all eight businesses on the chemicals park, with space for more as new operators come on to the site.

Today (5th September) the chemicals park unveiled an impressive new visitor reception area, at the heart of the site, replacing the gatehouse to which visitors previously reported. Senior executives from the partner businesses at Saltend gathered to celebrate the opening of the facility.

The changes are part of an extensive rebranding and upgrading of infrastructure and facilities across the site, costing £500,000 to date, to reinforce the chemicals park’s multi-operator status, raise its profile and promote the site to potential investors.

Saltend manufactures more than a million tonnes of chemicals products annually, for use on site, in the UK market or for export to Europe. The key raw materials required for many everyday items, such as clothing, packaging, inks, cosmetics and fertilisers, are produced on the chemicals park. As well as BP, the other businesses at Saltend are Air Products, INEOS, International Power, Kingston Research Ltd, Nippon Gohsei, Vivergo Fuels and Yara.

Chemicals Park Business Development Manager Diana Taylor said: “The rebranding and upgrading is about making this site a slick, professional operation and becoming the location of choice for investors in the chemicals and associated industries. It also puts the UK as a whole on the map for chemicals parks, enabling us to compete with those located in the rest of Europe”.

Chemicals Park Manager Dr Chris Bowlas says businesses at Saltend are inter-dependent and operate to mutual benefit at a “world-scale manufacturing site contributing hundreds of millions of pounds to UK Plc’s GDP”.

He added: “The idea is to make it more cost-effective for everybody - to bundle together our demand for services such as maintenance, facilities management and utilities. It makes us more powerful as a whole rather than different companies operating independently.”

Serdar Tufekci, Manager for Saltend power station, which is owned by International Power, welcomed the investment across the site and said the new reception would mean a more friendly and professional experience for visitors.

He said the chemicals park enabled businesses within it to be greener and more efficient through the sharing of products, resources and facilities.

“It is a very successful industrial cluster around a number of chemical operators and processes that complement each other,” said Mr Tufekci. “We also share our experiences and best practices, so it definitely helps to be in a non-competing and collaborative environment”.

Jon Howard, Operations Manager for chemicals manufacturer INEOS at Saltend, said: “We’ve had a number of customers who have visited us and said how impressed they have been with the site, its facilities, layout and how it all works. “The new visitor reception, ongoing re-branding and upgrading is all very welcome and takes the site further in the right direction”.

As well as being home to world-scale chemicals operations, Saltend Chemicals Park is becoming established as a centre of excellence for renewable technologies, as the Humber emerges as the UK’s leading green energy hub. Biofuels business Vivergo Fuels and Kingston Research Ltd, which is pioneering research into the next-generation biofuel, biobutanol, have both located at Saltend.

The chemicals park is close to the site of the Green Port Hull development, which will see £230 million invested in a Siemens turbines plant and related infrastructure at Alexandra Dock, as the catalyst for the creation of thousands of jobs in the offshore wind industry. A neighbouring site to Saltend, at Paull, is part of the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) enterprise zone and has been earmarked for a potential further major renewable energy investment.

The vast scale of operations at Saltend is illustrated by Vivergo Fuels’ £350 million investment in a biorefinery which will be one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Vivergo chose Saltend because of access to the region’s wheat belt; the deep-water location on the Humber for biofuel exports; and the excellent infrastructure and facilities, including power and steam from the on-site power plant.

The plant, which will begin production later this year, will take 1.1 million tonnes of feed-grade wheat annually from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire farms, making it the UK’s biggest wheat buyer. That wheat will be converted into 420 million litres of bioethanol, which reduces greenhouse gases in petrol - removing the equivalent of 200,000 cars from the roads each year - and 500,000 tonnes of animal feed to provide the protein requirement of 340,000 cows every day, 18 per cent of the national dairy herd.

For further information please contact:

John Meehan, Meehan Media & Comms.
Tel 01482 935220 or 07803 199492. E-mail: john@meehanmedia.co.uk