State-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) has confirmed that it is moving onto the next stage in its tender process for a new 600,000 barrels a day (b/d) refinery at Ruwais.

“We are now moving into the pre-feed [front-end engineering and design]. We have sought expressions of interest, and are now ready to issue a tender this month,” Abdulaziz al-Hajri, Adnoc’s downstream director told MEED.

The expansion of Ruwais, already 840,000 b/d, is at the heart of a new $45bn downstream investment plan launched by Adnoc in May. The expansion also includes the construction of one of the world’s largest mixed-feed crackers, which will boost production capacity to 14.4 million tonnes a year (t/y) by 2025 from 4.5 million t/y.

Having completed its feasibility studies and early design work, Adnoc also plans to issue a tender for the feed of a new linear alkyl benzene (LAB) plant at Ruwais, Al-Haji said, adding that an announcement on the feed tender will be made in the next couple of months.

MEED reported in early September that Adnoc had set a 15 September deadline for engineering firms to submit commercial bids for the front-end engineering and design (feed) contract for the LAB plant.

The planned LAB plant is being built by a joint venture of Adnoc and Cepsa, the Spain-based refiner that is owned by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company. Cepsa is already one of the largest LAB producers in the world.

The pair plan to built a 150,000 t/y facility, as part of a broader expansion of Adnoc’s integrated refining and petrochemicals complex in the western region of Ruwais.

Al-Hajri would not comment on the estimated budget value of the project. The plant will use benzene and kerosene from the adjacent Ruwais refinery to produce LAB, a key ingredient for the detergents industry. It is the first of a new planned cluster of units at Ruwais targeting the surfactants sector.

Surfactants are just one area of expansion in Adnoc’s downstream ambitions at Ruwais. It is currently courting international oil companies, refiners and petrochemicals producers to co-invest in the expansion of Ruwais, developing specific industrial clusters to use Ruwais’ abundant feedstock.