Sadara Chemical Company is set to award Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas a contract for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of three packages at its $20bn petrochemicals complex at Jubail in Saudi Arabia.

Sources in Saudi Arabia say that the Spanish contractor has picked up three of the technical packages at the joint venture between Saudi Aramco and the US’ Dow Chemical. The packages are:

• Ethylene oxide derivatives (EOD)
• Polyethylene oxide diacrylate (POD)
• Ethylene oxide shared system (EOSS).

“Three packages is a good result and it proves that Sadara is definitely not being dominated by the [South] Koreans like a lot of people thought it would be,” says an oilindustry contracting source based in Saudi Arabia. “This might be an indication that the Western contractors are starting to win some work in the kingdom again.”

The news adds to an eventful last few months for Tecnicas Reunidas in the kingdom as it has also picked up a $561m contract from Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic) for an acryilonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plant that will be built at the Arabian Petrochemical Company (Petrokemya) complex in Jubail.

Tecnicas Reunidas is also carrying out the front-end engineering and design (feed) for another Sabic project, a joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi Rayon Company.

Sadara has been tendering packages for well over a year and the majority have now been awarded. Successful contractors include South Korea’s Daelim Industrial and Daewoo Engineering & Construction, as well as the US’ Fluor, Jacobs Engineering and FosterWheeler.

The scheme has also used a number of different contracting strategies such as lump-sum turnkey (LSTK), engineering procurement and construction management (EPCM), as well as procurement and construction for packages where Dow has provided the technology.  

“A number of different strategies have been used for this project because of the sheer size of the undertaking,” says the source. “LSTK work might not have been as been as popular for this as it usually is on other projects, but this is a one-off.”

Sadara Chemical Company will have a capacity of about 8 million tonnes a year (t/y) and will be constructed at Jubail Industrial City 2 in the Eastern Province of the kingdom. It is scheduled for completion in late 2016. The complex will produce several speciality chemicals aimed at pushing Saudi Arabia’s petrochemicals industry further downstream.

MEED reported in late June that the neighbouring Saudi Aramco Total Refining and Petrochemical Company (Satorp) was in talks with Sadara regarding a phase II expansion that would include petrochemicals production.