Italy’s Maire Tecnimont has been awarded an $895m package on Oman’s Liwa Plastics project.

The contract is for the realisation of a polyethylene plant and a polypropylene plant on an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) basis for a value of approximately $895m by Oman Oil Refineries and Petroleum Industries Company (Orpic).

The contract was signed at a ceremony in Muscat along with contracts for the three other EPC packages. The total value of all four packages was $4.5bn

Orpic is Oman’s national refining and petrochemicals company and provides fuel, chemicals and feedstock domestically and worldwide.

The polyethylene and polypropylene units will be located in the Sohar Industrial Port Area and will use technology licensed from Univation Technologies and Basell Poliolefine technology.

The package’s scope of work includes the provision of engineering services, equipment and material supply and construction activities up to commissioning, start up and guarantee test run of:

• A Polyethylene Plant consisting of two “swing” units with a capacity of 880,000 tonnes a year (t/y) of high density polyethylene and linear low density polyethylene
• A Polypropylene Plant with a capacity of 300,000 t/y

It is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2019.

This contract is Maire Tecnimont Group’s first award in Oman and the plant will be the first polyethylene-producing facility in the country.

Maire Tecnimont announced the latest contract award on its website on 18 December.

Liwa Plastics will be the largest petrochemicals operation in Oman, and is one the largest single projects ever undertaken in the sultanate.

The cracker will use a combination of feedstocks including NGLs extracted from natural gas, liquid petroleum gas (LPG) from the Sohar refinery and aromatics plant, dry gas from the Sohar refinery, and condensates from Oman LNG.

As well as producing polyethylene and polypropylene it will also produce 90,000 t/y of methyl tert-butyl ether; 41,000 t/y of butane; and 111,000 t/y of pyrolysis gasoline.

In November MEED reported that a consortium of Netherlands-based CB&I and Taiwanese group CTCI has been awarded the $2.8bn steam cracker package for the Liwa Plastics project.