Millennium Petrochemicals to Purchase, Market DuPont Packaging's VAM

DuPont Packaging and Industrial Polymers (Wilmington, DE) and Millennium Petrochemicals Inc. have entered a long-term agreement whereby Millennium will purchase vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) produced at DuPont's LaPorte, Texas, plant, beginning January 1, 2001. The agreement covers all VAM produced by DuPont at LaPorte, excluding VAM used by DuPont for internal consumption.

Millennium Petrochemicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Millennium Chemicals Inc., is a large VAM producer in North America, with 800 million pounds per year of capacity at LaPorte, Texas. Millennium will market DuPont-manufactured VAM worldwide, using Millennium's existing distribution network. Millennium's resulting total VAM sales are expected to exceed 1 billion pounds per year.

The agreement, says Peter P. Hanik, president and CEO of Millennium Petrochemicals, "improves our ability to reliably serve our customers by having two separate VAM production facilities." He adds, "Millennium's 1-billion-lb/yr acetic acid plant in LaPorte will supply acid to DuPont for VAM production. The agreement is consistent with our strategy of growing our core acetic acid and VAM businesses."

DuPont manufactures VAM for its own consumption in the production of Elvanol polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), as well as other ethylene copolymers.