Saudi Aramco’s trading arm Aramco Trading Company (ATC) has signed an agreement to supply crude oil feedstock to Egypt’s state-owned Red Sea National Refining & Petrochemical Company’s (RSNRPC) $7.5bn integrated refining and petrochemicals project.

Under the agreement, ATC will supply 100,000 barrels a day (bpd) of Arabian Crude grade to the complex that RSNRPC is planning to build on a 3.56 million square metre plot at the Suez Canal Economic Zone in Ain Sokhna.

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In return, ATC will buy products from the RSNRPC project, which include polymers, olefins and liquid refined and petrochemicals products, Aramco said in a statement. 

“The planned petrochemicals refinery is expected to have a liquid-to-chemicals conversion rate of around 60-70 per cent, which is the main pillar in Egypt’s Petroleum & Mineral Resource Ministry’s national transformation programme,” Aramco added.

Front-end engineering and design work on the scheme is progressing and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

In July last year, RSNRPC awarded France’s Axens a contract related to engineering work on the planned complex. Under the terms of the deal, Axens will provide the technology for the complex to produce hydrogen-processed mazut and other petrochemicals.

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Also in July, US consultancy firm Bechtel won a deal to implement basic engineering and design works for the project. UK-based Wood Group has won a detailed feasibility study contract for the project.

Project capacity

The Ain Sokhna complex is envisaged to house a crude oil refinery with a processing capacity of 2.7-3.2 million tonnes a year (t/y).

Petrochemicals-producing units integrated with the refinery will have output capacities of 1.4 million t/y of ethylene and polyethylene, 900,000 t/y of polypropylene, 250,000 t/y of butadiene, 350,000 t/y of benzene, and 100,000 t/y of hexene-1, among other derivatives such as polyester.

This article is published by MEED, the world’s leading source of business intelligence about the Middle East. MEED provides exclusive news, data and analysis on the Middle East every day. For access to MEED’s Middle East business intelligence, subscribe here.