Egyptian refiner advances grassroots hydrocracking complex

Assiut National Oil Processing Co. (ANOPC), a subsidiary Egyptian General Petroleum Corp.’s Assiut Oil Refining Co. (ASORC), has let a contract to a consortium of Engineering Co. for Petroleum & Chemical Industries (ENPPI), Petroleum Projects & Technical Consultation Co. (Petrojet), and TechnipFMC PLC for construction of ANOPC’s previously announced hydrocracking complex in Assiut, Egypt (OGJ Online, Oct. 8, 2018).

As part of the contract, signed in mid-February, ENPPI will deliver detailed engineering, procurement, construction (EPC), precommissioning, commissioning, and start-up tests for the complex’s vacuum distillation unit (VDU), distillate hydrotreating unit (DHU), sulfur recovery unit (SRU), and sulfur solidification unit (SSU), ENPPI said in posts to its official LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

Once completed, the $2.5-billion hydrocracking complex will process 2.5 million tonnes/year of heavy fuel oil (mazut) from ASORC’s nearby 4.5 million-tpy Assiut refinery to produce about 2.8 million tpy of Euro 5-quality diesel and other high-value products to help meet Upper Egypt’s rising demand for petroleum products as well reduce the country’s reliance on imports, according to project documentation from Egypt’s Ministry of Petroleum & Mineral Resources (MOPMR) dated January 2020, as well as a Feb. 14 post to Petrojet’s official Facebook account.

While ENPPI did not disclose further details regarding its partners’ current scope of work on the project, TechnipFMC previously confirmed it most recently was awarded a contract for basic design of the complex, as well as an earlier contract to provide preliminary works on a former iteration of the project (OGJ Online, Oct. 31, 2018; July 27, 2015).

TechnipFMC also previously awarded a contract to ENPPI as a subcontractor for early works on the hydrocracking complex, the scope of which—alongside the VDU, DHU, SRU, SSU, as well as on-site and off-site storage areas—was to cover basic engineering, finalization of the licencors’ process design package, procurement services for long-lead items, and open-book cost estimates to define the project’s overall EPC cost, according to ENPPI’s 2018 annual report.

Alongside Euro 5-quality diesel, ENPPI and MOPMR said the new hydrocracking complex also will produce the following:

• 360,000-400,000 tpy of naphtha.
• 91,000-101,000 tpy of LPG.
• 331,000 tpy of coke.
• 57,000-66,400 tpy of sulfur.

In a series of June 2019 posts to its official LinkedIn account, ANOPC—which was established in 2018 specifically to build and operate the hydrocracking complex—confirmed Petrojet already had undertaken site preparation works in Assiut for construction of the complex.

The hydrocracking complex currently is scheduled to be completed in 2022, according to MOPMR.