Saudi Arabia’s Rabigh Refining & Petrochemical Company (PetroRabigh) has cancelled two of the three packages of its planned Clean Fuels Project, according to sources familiar with the project.

PetroRabigh tendered three engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) packages in October 2015 and received bids from international companies in February.

The two packages cancelled are:

• Polyols production unit – capacity of 220,000 tonnes a year (t/y) of polyether polyols
• Sulphur recovery unit – capacity of 106,000 t/y of sulphur

PetroRabigh is still assessing bids on a third package to build a naphtha processing unit with the capacity to produce 17,000 barrels a day (b/d) of clean fuels.

Italy-based Tecnimont has submitted the lowest bid for this package, according to a source. Other bidders are thought to include Taiwan-based CTCI, South Korea’s Daelim, Spanish group Intecsa Industrial and Tecnicas Reunidas, and India-based Larsen & Toubro.

The facility will be built at PetroRabigh’s site in Rabigh in the Mecca province, on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast. PetroRabigh was formed in 2005 by a joint venture of state oil company Saudi Aramco and Japanese group Sumitomo Chemical.

The front-end engineering and design (feed) study for the scheme was carried out by UK-based Amec Foster Wheeler.

PetroRabigh said when it tendered the EPC packages in October 2015 that the work would commence in the second half of 2016.