Saudi Aramco has awarded the US’ Foster Wheeler the front-end engineering and design (feed) and project management services contract for the Clean Transportation Fuels Project (CTFP) at the Riyadh refinery.

The work will be carried out by Foster Wheeler and its in-kingdom partners, the local A al-Saihati, A Fattani & O al-Othman Consulting Engineering Company (Sofcon) but it will not be part of the company’s general engineering services plus (GES plus) contract it signed with Aramco earlier this year (MEED 25:2:11).

The project is part of Aramco’s plan to reduce the sulphur content of gasoline and diesel produced by the refinery to 10 parts per million, and to reduce the level of benzene in gasoline.

“This is an interesting contract in that the number of man hours is not that high, but there will be several similar projects in the future,” says a contracting source based in Saudi Arabia. “If [Foster Wheeler] could also pick up those, then it would become a pretty significant amount of work.”  

The project is part of Aramco’s plan to reduce the sulphur content of gasoline and diesel produced by the refinery

The feed will be conducted from its offices in Al-Khobar and the scope of works includes new isomerisation, naphtha splitting and sulphur guard-bed units, as well as a diesel hydrotreater reactors. Other work includes the debottlenecking of the hydrocracker and gas concentration units, and replacement of crude and vacuum distillation tower internals.