Hohhot in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region began work on a coal-to-ethylene glycol facility on July 1.

The facility, established by Inner Mongolia Jiutai New Material Co Ltd, will produce ethylene glycol by using technology from Davy Process Technology to transform local coal resources into high value-added ethylene glycol.

The facility will cover an area of 2,565 mu (171 hectares), making it the largest ethylene glycol production facility in the world. It will have an annual production capacity of 1 million tons and a single-series production capacity of 500,000 tons.

Construction on the facility will take three years and it is expected to enter its trial phase by the end of 2020, before beginning official operations in 2021.

Jiutai said that the project is expected to make 10.6 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) annually with a profit tax of 3.66 billion yuan.

According to Jiutai, pre-procedures have all been completed and the project is now in full swing. Fourteen large construction zones have already been completed.

The project received a total of 13.3 billion yuan in investment. Nearly 2.57 billion yuan was used in 2018, and 8 billion yuan is expected to be used in 2019.