The Sadara Chemical Company (Sadara) has released the tender for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the ethylene oxide package as part of its $20bn complex at Jubail in Saudi Arabia.

The contract will be executed on a lump-sum turnkey basis and has a value of about $600m. The tender was released on 12 September, with a deadline for late November or early December.

“This is not the biggest package [at Sadara], but it is still substantial,” says a contracting source based in the kingdom.

The prequalified contractors for the package are:

• CTCI (Taiwan)
• Daelim Industrial (South Korea)
• Foster Wheeler (US)
• Saipem (Italy)
• Samsung Engineering (South Korea)
• Sinopec Engineering (China)
• Tecnicas Reunidas (Spain)
• Tecnimont/SK Engineering & Construction (Italy/South Korea)

“The rest of the contractors on the bid list for this package will now have to come up with an offer lower than the [South] Koreans,” says the source. “On current form, that is going to be tough.”

Out of the packages that have been released by Sadara, Daelim has been the most successful bidder winning a total of five EPC contracts worth about $1.9bn on the project so far.

MEED reported in August that four of the packages have been bundled together and they are the PMDI and TDI isocyanates, Dinitrotoluene nitric acid and sulphuric acid, MNB and the Aniline and formalin units (MEED 5:8:11).

Daelim also won the EPC for the mixed-feed cracker, which it will execute in partnership with France’s Technip.

Saudi Aramco and the US’ Dow Chemical are 50:50 partners in the project, the name of which recently changed to Sadara Chemical Company.

It was also known as the Ras Tanura Integrated Project. The complex will produce more than 3 million tonnes of chemicals a year when full production begins in 2015-16.