MOSCOW (MRC) -- Dubai’s ENOC Group and Rotary Arabia have completed construction of pipelines and tanks to store and transport petrochemicals in Saudi Arabia, according to ArabNews.
The infrastructure development between Horizon Terminals Limited, ENOC’s terminals arm, and Rotary Arabia - the front-end contractors for the project, saw the construction of four new pipelines from Farabi Petrochemicals’ Yanbu facility on the Red Sea coast to storage tanks at Arabtank Terminal.
The GCC’s chemical capacity is expected to increase by more than a third over the next decade reaching 231.8 million tons, driven by refining expansion and chemical integration.
Arab Tank Terminal Limited (ATTL) - which is Horizon Terminals’ Saudi based terminal, has a petroleum and chemical storage capacity of 288,100 cubic meters spread across 26 storage tank. Two additional pipelines were also constructed from ATTL to Berth 21 at Port of King Fahad Yanbu.
“The GCC chemical industry today is predominantly focused on petrochemicals which make up 72 percent of its total production, with Saudi Arabia being the leading producer in the region, accounting for 68.2 percent of total chemical output,” said ENOC Group CEO Saif Humaid Al-Falasi. “Our expansion into the Kingdom comes at a time when the regional market is poised to step up overseas production capacity by 7.6%.”
Farabi Petrochemicals currently supplies to the domestic market and benefits from the Port of King Fahad Yanbu infrastructure to export chemicals to the GCC, Europe and Asia. The new pipelines from its Yanbu facility will enable faster and more efficient transportation of petrochemical products.
As MRC reported earlier, Yanbu National Petrochemical Company (Yansab), part of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic), has restarted its cracker after a planned turnaround. Thus, the cracker in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, which can produce 1.38 mln mt/year of ethylene and 400,000 mt/year of propylene, resumed operations on 15 February, 2021. It was shut for a turnaround on 5 February.
The company also has polyolefin plants at the same site with production capacity of 400,000 tons/year of polypropylene (PP) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) each. They were also taken off-line for maintenance on 5 February. Both plants resumed production shortly after the cracker.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC"s ScanPlast report, Russia"s estimated PE consumption totalled 241,030 tonnes in January 2021 versus 217,890 tonnes a year earlier. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market reached 141,870 tonnes in January 2021 versus 123,520 tonnes a year earlier. Supply of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased.
MRC