The plant, which was located in Abadan adjacent to the refinery, manufactured raw materials for the domestic plastics and detergent industries. The Shahpur Chemical Company , a wholly owned subsidiary of NPC, operated a large complex built on tidal mud flats on the edge of the Persian Gulf near the port of Bandar Shahpur. With domestic demand for fertilizer rising rapidly, the Shahpur complex, like its counterpart in Shiraz, was undergoing a major expansion programme, which would have boosted the production of urea to 695,000 tons, of diammonium phosphate to 673,000 tons, sulphur to 633,000 tons. Its plant on Kharg Island produced some 230,000 tons of sulphur and 300,000 tons of li uefied propane and butane, using as its feedstock associated gases from onshore and offshore oilfields. The plant in Ahvaz manufactured 15,000 tons of carbon black annually, about 95 per cent of the domestic rubber industry's current needs.
Capacity is to be doubled within the next few years.
In addition to the above, severa major joint venture projects wereunder implementation. The paraxylene, orthoxylene, cyclohexane and benzene from this plant would have been the raw materials for other projects. The first phase completed in 1976, involved the annual production at Bandar Shahpur of 23,000 tons of phthalic anhydride and 40,000 tons of dioctyl phthalate, both used by the plastics industry. Initially some of these products would have been been exported, but as domestic demand increased downstream manufacturing units would also have been set up. Although NPC, directly or with experienced foreign partners, was responsible for all the major petrochemical projects, private Iranian industrialists were also involved in the industry, mainly in downstream processing units.