VENEZUELA: Plastic Hailed as Solution to Housing Crisis

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 7 2005 (IPS) - Venezuela, suffering a severe housing shortage, plans to build hundreds of thousands of new homes with plastic walls in the coming years, made possible by a major expansion of the country’s petrochemical industry.

– We are going to make Venezuela a petrochemical leader," said President Hugo Chávez while touring a model home built with concrete-filled, polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-covered walls, at the El Tablazo industrial park near Maracaibo Lake, in northwestern Venezuela.

The government plans to invest 10 billion dollars over the next seven years in the petrochemical industry, with the goal of raising its current output of 11.4 million tons annually to 25 million tons as of 2012.

The petrochemical sector was first developed in this South American nation half a century ago and is now concentrated in three industrial parks: the state-owned El Tablazo and Morón complexes in north-central Venezuela and the Jose industrial park in the east, used for joint venture operations.

A total of roughly 40 different products are manufactured, primarily plastics, fertilisers and industrial compounds like methanol, benzene, toluene and MTBE (methyl-tertiary butyl ether), an additive used in unleaded gasoline.

The state-run petrochemical company Pequiven was formerly a subsidiary of state-owned oil giant PDVSA, but Chávez decided that this sector should be made ôindependent" to give it greater flexibility in business operations, leading to the establishment in late June of the Venezuelan Petrochemical Corporation.

The new corporation’s first undertaking was the signing of an agreement with the Brazilian company Brasken, for the joint construction of a plant with the capacity to produce 400,000 tons of polypropylene (a type of plastic) annually. The plant is scheduled to enter into operation in 2007.

But the ôstar" of Venezuela’s new petrochemical production will be the PVC panels filled with concrete and used to build houses.

The new corporation’s technical specialists maintain that this novel construction material is highly resistant to the effects of extreme weather and aging, and offers excellent insulation properties against both heat and cold.

Francisco Toro, one of the corporation’s directors, travelled to Quebec, Canada to observe the production and use of PVC panels designed for housing construction.

He commented to IPS that these materials lend themselves perfectly to ôdo-it-yourself" home building. ôThree people can ‘assemble’ a house in a week," he explained.

Toro reported that the government plans to build at least 100,000 new homes annually as a means of tackling the severe housing shortage facing Venezuela, estimated at 1.6 million units. The country currently has a total of roughly 6.5 million housing units, according to official statistics.

In Venezuela, ôwe have the raw material to produce PVC at an extremely low cost. Natural gas costs us 1.2 dollars per 1,000 cubic feet, which is one fifth of its price in North America," noted Toro.

During his tour of the El Tablazo industrial park, Chávez pointed out that Venezuela has the largest natural gas reserves in South America, but added that there have been difficulties involved in transporting the enormous volumes of natural gas produced in eastern Venezuela to the country’s western region, and this has created problems for the petrochemical industry, refineries, and even oil drilling.

At present, the natural gas available in the oil-producing area of northwestern Venezuela has to be shared among the Paraguaná refinery complex in the northwestern tip of the country, the El Tablazo petrochemical complex, domestic consumption, and reinjection into the wells that produce crude oil.

The entry into operation of a natural gas pipeline linking east and west Venezuela, scheduled for December, will be the first step towards modernising and expanding the country’s petrochemical complexes, beginning with El Tablazo, and then Morón and Jose, said Chávez.

There also plans for the construction of a new petrochemical complex in Guiria, located in the country’s northeastern tip, near the rich natural gas fields of the southeastern Caribbean shared by Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.

State funding for the expansion of Venezuela’s petrochemical infrastructure will come from the ôsurplus reserves" that the government expects to receive from the Central Bank, which has over 28 billion dollars in reserves, almost a third more than the amount needed in recent years by the Venezuelan economy.

With the expansion of El Tablazo, at least 60,000 tons of the 120,000 tons of PVC currently produced every year could be devoted to the production of materials for 30,000 houses.

The price of each would be roughly 11,600 dollars, which is one third less expensive than if other materials were used, according to studies by the Ministry of Housing and Habitat.

While touring the model home, Chávez, who is now 52, asked for one of the houses to be reserved for him for 2021 – which he has referred to in numerous public appearances as the year he plans to retire from politics.