China – Saudi Arabia: Joint Petrochemical Complex Worth About 10 Billion Dollars
Saudi Arabia wants to increase oil exports to China to one million barrels a day
China’s state-owned giants Sinopec and Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco have started construction of a refinery and petrochemical complex in Gulei Industrial Park, in China’s southeast Asian country’s Fujian province. The cost of the project is estimated at $9.82 billion.
Fujian Petrochemical is a joint venture between Sinopec and the Fujian provincial government, which will hold a 50 percent stake in the project, while Saudi Aramco and Sinopec will hold 25 percent each.
As the two companies wrote in a joint press release, the project, which is “expected to be fully operational by the end of 2030, includes: a super refinery with a capacity of 16 million metric tons of oil processed per year (t/y), i.e., 320,000 barrels of refined oil per day; an ethylene plant with a capacity of 1.5 million tons per year; and a plant to produce p-xylene (para-xylene), a hydrocarbon used in the production of polyesters, including polyethylene terephthalate (PET), with a capacity of 2 million tons per year.” China’s giant petrochemical complex will also include an oil terminal capable of temporarily storing up to 300,000 tons of oil.
For Saudi Aramco, it is another important step toward increasing oil exports to China, part of a plan to supply the world’s second-largest economy with one million barrels of crude per day.
Once production starts in 2030, the Fujian Petrochemical combine is expected to supply China’s petrochemical industry with 5 million tons of valuable crude material per year.
This is the so-called second phase of the ethylene complex expansion, which Sinopec put into operation in 2021 under a joint venture with a Taiwanese investment company. Sinopec also launched a new 1.2 million tons-per-year ethylene complex in northern China last week and is building another plant of similar size in Zhenhai, eastern China.
Also working in the Gulei Industrial Park is Saudi Basic Industries Corp. in cooperation with a local government-backed company; they are going to build a $6.4 billion petrochemical complex.
