Saudi Aramco is negotiating to reach an agreement for the memorandum of understanding with US based Dow Chemical Co for a US$15 billion petrochemical plant near the 550,000-bpd Ras Tanura oil refinery. The FEED contract would be awarded early next year and construction is expected to commence in 2009. The project is slated for startup in Q2-2012. Aramco also expects to raise debt of more than US$10 billion for the project, of which 30% will be offered as initial public offering (IPO). The IPO will take place only after the completion of front end engineering design (FEED) for the project as well as the financing.
The core units of the project are an ethane/naphtha-based cracker, a high olefin fluid catalytic cracking complex, an aromatics complex and a chlor-alkali complex. It involves around 30 downstream process units producing more than 300 different products.
20-Nov-06 
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