MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi Arabia's Petro Rabigh expects to complete all construction work at its second Rabigh plant by September 2016, reported TPS with reference to the company's announcement.
This means that the construction will be completed nine months later than originally planned.
The company stated that the Rabigh 2 project's infrastructure works were completed by the end of 2015, and that water and electrical facilities related to the expansion project are operational.
Petro Rabigh expects its ethane cracker capacity to rise to 125 million cubic feet per day by Q1 2016, and plans to gradually start up its new units from H2 2016.
The total cost of Rabigh 2 has risen by 1 billion Saudi Riyals ($266.49 million), to almost 31 billion Saudi Riyals ($8.26 billion) due to additions and delays to the project, the company said.
"We are expecting our paraxylene (PX) units to come onstream Dec 2016," a company source said.
As MRC informed previously, Petro Rabigh expects to take a Saudi Riyal 300 million (USD79.92 million) cost hit amid gas prices hikes starting 2016. This announcement came in response to Saudi Arabia's earlier decision to hike its ethane and methane prices for 2016.
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