Oman Refineries and Petroleum Industries Company (Orpic) has asked companies to submit front-end engineering and design (feed) proposals on its Liwa Plastics petrochemicals project by 17 November.

The deadline for bids on the feed tender, which was floated in August, has been delayed from October, according to sources close to the bidding process.

The $3.6bn petrochemicals complex will include a steam cracker and several plants to produce polyethylene, polypropylene, methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) and butane-1.

The companies invited to bid all have steam cracker technology licences and include:

• CB&I Lummus (US)
• KBR (US)
• Linde Group (Germany)
• Technip (France)

The steam cracker will be fuelled with a combination of natural gas liquids, refined dry-gas, mixed liquid petroleum gas and condensate. Any ethane and propane produced during the cracking process will be recycled back into the furnace section. The project is expected to be completed by 2018.

Orpic’s current operations in Sohar have the capacity to produce 818,000 tonnes a year (t/y) of paraxylene, 198,000 t/y of benzene and 340,000 t/y of PP.

Oman Gas Company (OGC) is planning a project to extract natural gas liquids (NGL) from pipeline gas to provide feedstock for Liwa Plastics. The feed phase on the NGL plant is expected to start in 2014.