Egypt Hydrocarbon Corporation (EHC) has finalized EPC contract terms with Italy’s Maire Tecnimont for a new ammonia plant at Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea. Tecnimont says the contract’s value is $550mn and will involve building a 480,000 t/y ammonia plant with utilities and offsites. The plant will provide feedstock for a 350,000 t/y ammonium nitrate plant that EHC started up at Ain Sukhna in 2017. Tecnimont says the project will take 36 months from the contract effective date, which “will be triggered by financial closing of the project.” Tecnimont says EHC is negotiating with Italy’s Sace and US Exim Bank to secure finance.
EHC and Tecnimont will hope the financing does not suffer the lengthy delays that hit Tahrir Petrochemicals, like EHC a subsidiary of Egypt’s Carbon Holdings, which plans to build a 1.5mn t/y cracker and polyolefins units in the Suez Canal Economic Zone at a cost of $10.9bn. The project, conceived when Egypt’s gas resources were increasingly overstretched, is intended to process 4mn t/y of imported naphtha (MEES, 4 April 2014). Financing remains incomplete despite EPC work being awarded in mid-2018 (MEES, 14 December 2018). (CONTINUED - 189 WORDS)