Saudi Aramco and its partner, Total have announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Daelim to build an 80,000 tons polyisobutylene (PIB) plant.
As per the terms of the MoU, the plant is expected to come on-stream in 2024, with the launch of its Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) to start in February 2019 and conclude in the fourth quarter of 2019. The company mentioned that this agreement is another step to drive its petrochemical growth strategy and follows their announcement from last year to launch an engineering study to build a $5 billion petrochemical complex in Jubail.
The new petrochemicals facility will be using feedstock from the Amiral complex in Jubail, located on the kingdom’s eastern coast and will be the first time that the PIB product will be developed in the country itself, the company stated.
PIB is a high value-added chemical product and has a wide range of industrial applications such as adhesives, lubricants and fuel additives.
Aramco also said that the chemical project will be part of the large-scale petrochemical complex of Amiral which is located in the value park for which they will be using South Korea-based Daelim’s PIB proprietary technology to produce a wide range of products in a single plant, from conventional PIB (CPIB) to highly reactive PIB (HR-PIB).
