The US’ Jacobs Engineering has won a contract to provide front-end engineering and design (Feed) services on Abu Dhabi Polymers Company’s (Borouge) third-phase expansion of its Ruwais petrochemicals complex.

Jacobs will help the main Feed contractor, Italy’s Tecnimont, develop a section of the project which will compound and handle the plastics produced at the plant, the US engineering firm said on 29 September.

The US company will complete its portion of the Feed by the end of the first half of 2010.

The Borouge 3 project will increase Abu Dhabi’s total petrochemicals production at Ruwais to 4.5 million tonnes a year (t/y), making it the largest complex of its kind in the world.

Once the third-phase expansion is complete, the complex will produce polypropylene, polyethylene, and the specialist plastic low-density polyethylene (LDPE), used to produce piping.

Borouge now produces 600,000 t/y of polyethylene at its Ruwais site. A second phase expansion, Borouge 2, will increase production to 2 million t/y of polyethylene and polypropylene, while the third phase expansion will add another 2.5 million t/y of plastics.