MOSCOW (MRC) -- SPIE Oil & Gas Services, the consortium of Saudi Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical, has been awarded a contract for the Petro Rabigh II project, said Arabianoilandgas.
This contract, awarded to SPIE Oil & Gas Services Saudi LLC, a subsidiary of SPIE Oil & Gas Services, is a comprehensive offer for the commissioning and start-up of Units Naphtha, Aromatics and Cumene Phenol and utilities for of the Petro Rabigh refining and petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia.
"This project is planned for a minimum period of one year with hundreds of specialists in various disciplines inherent in the mentioned units", a press release from SPIE says.
Petro Rabigh II is the expansion of the original phase I of the Petro Rabigh refining and petrochemical complex located about 150km north of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The project consists of the expansion of the existing ethane cracker, the construction of an aromatic complex and an ethylene plant.
It will produce an additional 30mn cubic feet a day of ethane, 3mn tonnes of naphtha and 300,000 tonnes of ethylene per year, which will be used as raw materials to produce a variety of petrochemical products.
It began after Saudi Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the feasibility study in April 2009. The total investment of the project is estimated about USD8bn, and is expected to generate about 1,200 direct jobs.
"This project is the fourth major project awarded directly to SPIE Oil & Gas services Saudi LLC for the past five years, and comes after SATORP, YASREF and SADARA", Yves Company, managing director of SPIE Oil & Gas Services, said.
"This significant contract is a recognition of SPIE Oil & Gas Services ability, skills and expertise in the management of commissioning and start-up complex projects in Saudi Arabia but also in the rest of the Middle East," he added.
As MRC informes earlier, Saudi Arabia's PetroRabigh will launch the bidding process on Monday to build new units, including one to produce clean fuel, at its petrochemical and refining complex in Rabigh. It will launch engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) tenders for a polyether polyols plant with a capacity of 220,000 tonnes per year, a 17,000 barrels per day naphtha treating unit to produce clean fuel and a 106,000 tonnes per year sulphur recovery unit (SRU). If the bids are approved work would start in the second half of 2016, the company, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Japan's Sumitomo Chemical, said.
PetroRabigh, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Japan's Sumitomo Chemical, has an annual output capacity of 18 million tonnes of refined products and 2.4 million tonnes of petrochemicals. Thus, the complex currently has a cracker to produce 1.3-million t/y of ethylene and 900,000 t/y of propylene, as well as downstream production of polyethylene, polypropylene, propylene oxide, ethylene glycol and butene-1.
MRC