Sonatrach has made two key awards in a bid to revamp its downstream capacity. Agreements with France’s Total for engineering studies into a polypropylene complex at Arzew and with US firm Honeywell UOP for technology licenses for new upgrading units at Skikda refinery come after the state company effectively acknowledged its only short-term hope of bridging its products shortfall was the purchase of a refinery in Sicily from ExxonMobil (MEES, 11 May).
Total expects the petchems complex on the Mediterranean to cost $1.4bn and comprise a propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit and a 550,000 t/y polypropylene plant (PP). Sonatrach (51%) and Total (49%) plan to start front-end engineering and design this summer. Feedstock for the PDH unit will be locally produced propane: the requirement will be up to 23,000 b/d. Algeria produced just under 500,000 b/d of NGLs in 2017. (CONTINUED - 749 WORDS)
