Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. plans to add a 600,000-b/d refinery at its Ruwais refining and petrochemical complex as part of a $45-billion project that will further expand petrochemical output.
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, United Arab Emirates minister of state and ADNOC group chief executive officer, announced the expansion May 13 at a conference in Abu Dhabi.
Two refineries at Ruwais have combined capacity of 817,000 b/d, according to earlier ADNOC documents. The company earlier disclosed plans for a $3.1-billion project to increase feedstock flexibility at the complex (OGJ Online, Feb. 8, 2018).
In a press release about Jaber’s announcement, ADNOC said it has total refining capacity of 922,000 b/d but included condensate as well as crude inputs. ADNOC also operates an 85,000-b/d refinery in the Umm Al Nar section of Abu Dhabi City.
In addition to the refinery, the Ruwais project will include construction of one of the world’s largest mixed-feed crackers, which will boost production capacity to 14.4 million tonnes/year by 2025 from 4.5 million tonnes/year in 2016, according to the press release.
The entire complex, ADNOC said, will be “upgraded to dramatically increase its flexibility and integrated capabilities to produce greater volumes of higher-value petrochemicals and derivative products.”
Also at Ruwais, ADNOC will add “Derivatives and Conversion Parks” to encourage investment in products downstream of petrochemicals and development of related technologies.
Separately, ADNOC said in a May 14 press release it had signed a project-development agreement with Cepsa of Spain for a linear alkylbenzene (LAB) facility, to be integrated with the Ruwais refining complex, with production capacity of 150,000 tonnes/year.
Cepsa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co., Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. Under a memorandum of understanding signed last November, ADNOC and Cepsa completed a feasibility study and are ready to move the project to front-end engineering and design.
Abdulaziz Al Hajri, ADNOC downstream director, said the facility “will enable the emergence of a surfactants cluster in our new Ruwais Derivatives and Conversion Parks.”