Saudi Aramco, total and McDermott sign patent technology service contract

Recently, Saudi Aramco, total and McDermott signed a service contract for ethylene patent technology engineering of Jubail petrochemical project, which is located in Jubail on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. Aramco and total will jointly build the world's largest ethylene cracking plant with mixed raw materials. The joint venture is Amiral Petrochemical General Plant. McDermott said that the contract uses McDermott's Lummus technology. McDermott will provide the project with patent use license, basic engineering design package, extended basic engineering design, training, technical services and patent equipment. In particular, technical services include olefin technology, low-pressure recovery (refinery tail gas recovery and treatment), gas hydrotreating, catalytic distillation to produce cdmtbe, CDIB (reverse cracking of MTBE to produce high-purity isobutylene and methanol) and BASF NMP (N-methylpyrrolidone butadiene extraction process). In addition, Lummus will provide its proprietary short stay time (SRT) heater for the project. There will be another $500-250 million in contract orders in the third quarter, McDermott said. Saudi Aramco said the joint venture signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korean Petrochemical Company Dalin Daelim before signing the latest contract. According to the memorandum, Daelim plans to build a polyisobutylene plant with an annual output of 80000 tons in the Amiral complex in 2024.

The front-end engineering and design of the polyisobutylene plant started in February this year and will be completed in the fourth quarter of this year. Polyisobutylene will use Daelim's proprietary polyisobutylene technology, with the products of Amiral petrochemical plant as raw materials. The project was first announced in April 2018, and its construction site is the 440000b / D oil refinery of Saudi Aramco in Jubail. According to Saudi Aramco and total, the new unit includes a mixed feed steam cracking unit (50% ethane and refinery gas), with a capacity of 1.5 million tons / year ethylene and related petrochemical products, and an overall output of over 2.7 million tons / year high-quality chemical products. The proposed Amiral petrochemical complex is expected to be put into operation in 2024 and is currently in the feed stage. In addition to Saudi Aramco and total's total investment in ethylene projects of about 5 billion US dollars, other supporting chemical plants need investment of 4 billion US dollars, which means the total investment of the project is about 9 billion US dollars.