The Heart of the PET Bottle, Now Made in Iran

The water bottle we pick up off a supermarket shelf, in Tehran or in Lisbon, starts its life with a material few people have heard of: an ethylene oxide catalyst. At Morvarid Petrochemical in Asaluyeh, that catalyst is now made in Iran, and the unit is running at full capacity. On this page we look together at what the catalyst is, how it works, and where its product ends up.

01. What happened

According to the Iranian Student News Network (SNN), loading of an Iranian-made EO catalyst in Morvarid Petrochemical's monoethylene glycol (MEG) unit has been completed, and production has reached 100% of capacity. Hesam Khoshbinfar described it as a strategic and rare achievement and said it places Iran alongside the six countries that make this product. In his account, localising this catalyst, a technology bottleneck in the MEG and polyester chain, succeeded on domestic capability despite the high technical risk that usually pushes industry towards imports.

02. What is a catalyst?

A catalyst is a material that makes a chemical reaction possible or faster without being used up itself. Think of it as a mountain guide: it takes molecules along a shorter, easier path, and is still standing there when the journey ends.

In petrochemicals, many products cannot be made without a catalyst, or only at far higher cost and energy. That is why catalysts are called the heart of a production unit.

03. How an EO catalyst works

In an ethylene oxide unit, ethylene gas reacts with pure oxygen to form ethylene oxide (C₂H₄O). The reaction sounds simple. Controlling it is the hard part:

• Structure: industrial EO catalysts are typically very fine silver particles on a porous alumina carrier, with small amounts of promoters that improve performance.
• Reactor: the catalyst is packed into thousands of narrow tubes inside a large reactor. The reaction releases heat, which is removed by boiling water around the tubes.
• Two competing reactions: instead of forming ethylene oxide, ethylene can burn completely into carbon dioxide and water. The catalyst's skill is keeping the useful reaction on top. That share is called selectivity.
• Why it matters: every extra point of selectivity means less ethylene wasted and less CO₂ produced. In a unit this size, a few percentage points add up to tens of thousands of tonnes of feed a year.
• Lifetime: these catalysts lose activity over time and are replaced every few years during major turnarounds, so supplying them is a recurring need, not a one-off purchase.

04. Which branch of petrochemicals?

Morvarid sits in the Pars Special Economic Energy Zone in Asaluyeh and works in the ethylene chain, which starts with South Pars gas:

• Ethane from the South Pars gas refineries
• Olefin unit: ethane is cracked in furnaces into about 500,000 tonnes of ethylene a year
• Glycol unit: about 340,000 tonnes of that ethylene, with oxygen supplied by Damavand Petrochemical, is turned into ethylene oxide over the EO catalyst
• End products: ethylene oxide reacts with water to form glycols: about 500,000 tonnes of MEG, 50,000 tonnes of DEG and 3,400 tonnes of TEG a year

So the catalyst works at exactly the point where a raw feedstock (ethylene) becomes a high-value intermediate.

05. Where the products end up

• PET bottles and packaging: PET is made from glycol and terephthalic acid, and glycol is about a third of the weight of every PET bottle: water, soft drinks, cooking oil, food containers.
• Polyester fibre: the largest use of glycol worldwide: clothing, carpets, curtains, sleeping bags and technical textiles.
• Antifreeze and coolants: car radiators and industrial cooling systems.
• DEG and TEG: resins, solvents, and drying natural gas, the same job done in the gas refineries themselves.
• Ethylene oxide itself (in other chains): the starting point for detergents and shampoos, ethanolamines for gas sweetening, solvents for paints and brake fluid, and sterilising medical equipment.

06. What is it worth?

The Asian contract price for MEG for November 2026 was set at $880 per tonne. Multiplying Morvarid's 500,000-tonne capacity by that price gives roughly $440 million of MEG a year. It is a simple estimate: actual selling prices, costs and annual output can differ. But it shows the scale of production that now runs on a domestically made catalyst.

The global EO catalyst market is held by a handful of companies. For a unit that has to replace its catalyst every few years, a domestic source means less dependence on imports, a shorter supply chain and technical support close at hand.

The takeaway: making a catalyst that only a handful of countries produce, and loading it into a unit this size, means accepting a risk most plants avoid. It was done by engineers, researchers and staff who kept the lights of production on in hard conditions.