PPG Industries announced today that it is increasing its precipitated silica production capacity at the Lake Charles, LA plant by more than 22,000 tons per year in response to growing demand. The new capacity will be on-stream in early 2014, and the project will result in a slight increase in employment at the plant.
PPG had previously announced a plan to increase its global precipitated silica capacity by more than 18,000 tons through phased expansions at Lake Charles and Delfzijl, Netherlands. In the new announcement, PPG indicated that this plan is on-schedule and these projects are already online or scheduled to be online by the end of 2012.
The silica products business and its production assets and employees are part of PPG’s Optical and Specialty Materials reporting segment, and so are not included in the planned separation of PPG’s commodity chemicals business and its subsequent merger with Georgia Gulf Corp, which was announced in July 2012.
Comments