Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemical will soon announce plans to proceed with their mega petrochemical complex joint venture at Jubail, says Khalid Al-Falih, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco. The project was originally planned for Ras Tanura but was moved to Jubail to save costs. The Jubail petrochemical project with Dow will cost approximately $20 billion, Al-Falih told journalists today on the sidelines of the GPCA Forum, co-organized by Chemical Week, currently taking place in Dubai. The Jubail project will include a “value park,” which will attract downstream investment around it. “That is the whole reason why we are so excited about the project,” Al-Falih said. Sources say the companies will soon announce project details, including a name for the jv, which the companies have already selected and are checking for copyrights. The project would have been much more costly had it stayed at Ras Tanura because of the lack of infrastructure there. Aramco and Dow reduced the scope of the complex to focus on one instead of two ethylene plants. CW has learned that the cracker will be fed by a mixture of ethane and naphtha and will be designed to produce1.5 million m.t./year of ethylene and 400,000 m.t.-450,000 m.t./year of propylene, depending on what feedstocks are used. Aramco will provide the feedstocks to the jv. Downstream products will include polyethylene, metallocene-based elastomers, ethylene oxide derivatives, and building blocks for the polyurethanes industry,including TDI, MDI and polyols. The completion date for the joint venture project is mid-2015. Separately, Al-Falih told journaliststhat phase 2 of Petro Rabigh will require an investment of $6 billion-$8 billion and “will bring many derivatives, which have never been produced in the Middle East before.”
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