DHAHRAN — Saudi Aramco with its partner Total Thursday announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Daelim, a South Korean petrochemical company. Under the MoU, Daelim is planning to build a new 80,000 tons state-of-the-art Polyisobutylene (PIB) plant, which is expected to come on-stream in 2024. This agreement is another step to drive Saudi Aramco’s petrochemicals growth strategy. This follows Saudi Aramco’s announcement in October 2018 to launch an engineering study to build a large petrochemical complex in Jubail.

The launch of the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) of the PIB plant will start in February 2019 and will be concluded in Q4 2019. The new petrochemicals facility will be using feedstock from the Amiral complex in Jubail, located on Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast. It is the first time that the PIB product will be developed in the Kingdom.

The facility’s location in Saudi Arabia will give Daelim access to competitive feedstock and energy, with large infrastructure, to better serve customers in the Middle East and markets across Europe and Asia.

This specialty chemical project will be part of the large-scale petrochemical complex of Amiral, located in the value park. It will be using 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).

PIB is a high value-added chemical product and has a wide range of industrial applications such as adhesives, lubricants and fuel additives. — SG