UAE's Borouge awards contracts to help develop petchems facility in Ruwais

The company wants to more than double production capacity by 2025

Employees at the command centre at the Borouge 3 petrochemical plant. Adnoc is developing the world's largest integrated refining and chemicals complex in Ruwais. Bloomberg

Borouge, the petrochemical joint venture between Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Austria's Borealis, awarded contracts to three companies to develop a facility in Ruwais as it plans to double its production capacity by 2025.

TechnipFMC of the UK, Maire Tecnimont of Italy and WorleyParsons of Australia won the contracts to develop the mixed-feed cracker as part of Borouge's fourth phase of expansion, the company said on Tuesday. It did not disclose the value of the contracts.

“The mixed-feed cracker is unique as it enables many new petrochemical building blocks to be available in Ruwais for the first time, thereby transforming Ruwais into an even more advanced integrated refining and petrochemicals complex,” said Abdulaziz Alhajri, executive director of downstream directorate at Adnoc.

Adnoc is undertaking various projects to transform Ruwais into a huge industrial hub, with plans to build the world’s largest integrated refinery and petchems complex as part of its Dh165 billion downstream push. The state-backed company wants to boost its refining capacity by more than 65 per cent to 1.5 million barrels per day by 2025 and triple petchems production to 14.4 million tonnes annually during the same period.

The fourth cracker in the Borouge complex  will be the world’s largest with 1.8 million tonnes per year of Ethylene output. Borouge did not provide a timeline for finishing the project.

Borouge, which currently has a capacity to produce 4.5 million tonnes of petchems a year, signed the front-end engineering and design (Feed) contract, project management contract (PMC) and licence contract associated with the mixed-feed cracker complex with the three companies.

Borouge, which relies on Ethane gas to produce its product, will for the first time use butane as well as naphtha coming from Adnoc's refining and gas processing facilities to produce petchems from the cracker. Naphtha is an oil by-product.

Having a cracker using both gas and naphtha will help develop a new range of petchem products for Borouge.

“Not only will the plant contribute to an additional $6 billion to Abu Dhabi’s gross domestic product annually as direct benefit from product revenue, our new project will also create thousands of job opportunities during construction phases and once it is commissioned,” said Ahmed Abdulla, chief executive of Borouge.

He said the fourth phase will generate more than $3.5bn in local procurement and construction activities during its engineering, procurement and construction phase.