EXCLUSIVE: Borouge to complete pre-feed for new plant

15 March 2018
Joint venture of Adnoc and Borealis likely to award the feed contract this year

Borouge, the joint venture of the downstream arm of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc Refining) and Austria’s Borealis, hopes to finish the pre-feed (front-end engineering and design) of its new plant in the “coming two to three months” or within the second quarter of 2018, according to the company’s CEO.

“Pre-feed is ongoing now just to give us a good definition of the project,” Ahmad Omar Abdulla told MEED in reference to the Borouge 4 petrochemicals plant, which “will mainly be integrated with the Adnoc Refining complex in Ruwais East and West”.

“One of the major consultants is doing it [pre-feed],” Abdulla said without naming the firm.

Borouge 1, 2 and 3 are operating today in Ruwais with a total capacity of 4.5 million tonnes a-year of different petrochemical products.

“Borouge 4 will help us in more than doubling the capacity. It will add new products to our portfolio, as well as help us create more opportunities to employ locals,” Abdulla said.

The feed contract for the project will be awarded later this year, he said, stopping short of specifying when. The contract for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) work will “of course take time,” he added.

The main feedstock for Borouge plants used to be gas, more specifically ethane and ethylene. However, due to the scarcity of natural gas in the UAE and to align with Adnoc’s Vision 2030 objective of becoming self-sufficient in gas, Borouge is considering the use of naphtha as feedstock.

“Borouge 4 is now being built on the clear understanding that it will be based on naphtha as feedstock," Abdulla said. "Naptha as feedstock is very challenging because of the margin is very slow. But we are working to make it very efficient, so that it fetches us a good, attractive margin by having value engineering and seeing how we can make it smarter and more efficient."

“It [Borouge 4] will give us more knowledge about naptha and naphtha processing. That is new for us.”

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