MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi Arabia's PetroRabigh said on Monday it had awarded a construction contract for its II expansion project to Italian oil service group Saipem, said Arabfinance.
PetroRabigh, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco IPO-ARM.SE and Japan's Sumitomo Chemical, said the total cost of the 30-month contract to expand its petrochemicals complex was 782 million Saudi riyals (USD208.5 million).
The contract includes a plant to process and recover vanadium and a unit to dispose of caustic soda.
The contract also includes some other facilities to handle and store chemicals, a statement from the firm said.
The Rabigh II expansion project inlcuded an expansion of an existing ethane cracker and a new aromatics complex to process more than 2.7 million tonnes of naphtha a year to make higher-value petrochemical products.
As MRC informed earlier, PetroRabigh brought on-stream its cracker and PE units following an unplanned outage. The company recently resumed operations at its cracker and PE units. The complex was taken off-stream on May 19, 2016 owing to a power failure. Located in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, the complex has an ethylene production capacity of 1.6 million mt/year, HDPE production capacity of 300,000 mt/year and LLDPE production capacity of 600,000 mt/year.
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