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MOSCOW (MRC) -- A consortium including
Hyundai Engineering Co Ltd and KBR Inc has expressed interest in a contract to
renovate Ecuador’s 110,000-barrel per day (bpd) Esmeraldas refinery, Energy
Minister Rene Ortiz and the companies said, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Last
year, Ortiz announced the search for a private company to invest around USD2.4
billion in the refinery, owned by state oil company Petroecuador, to boost fuel
output at the plant and help the cash-strapped South American country reduce
imports of refined products.
The consortium plans to receive financing
from Morgan Stanley. It has until February to present a final bid for the
project, according to a timeline presented by the energy ministry. The
government will make a final decision on awarding the contract in
March.
The contract will then be signed in April. The deal is part of
President Lenin Moreno’s efforts to boost private investment in Ecuador’s
struggling economy. He is set to leave office in May after presidential
elections next month.
The consortium also includes Texas-based companies
RGFx Initiatives and Energlobal Investment Group. Neither authorities nor
representatives of the four companies who attended a press conference clarified
how much the consortium was expected to invest, or the fees the consortium would
receive for eventually delivering refined products to the state for domestic
sale.
As per MRC, KBR announced that
Sinochem Quanzhou Petrochemical Co. has successfully commissioned a new ethylene
facility in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, utilizing KBR's SCORE (Selective
Cracking Optimum Recovery) technology. The 1-million-t/y ethylene plant is
part of Sinochem's grassroots integrated refining and petrochemical complex,
which also includes a 400,000-t/y high-density polyethylene (HDPE) facility,
which recently achieved on-spec production, as well as an 800,000-t/y paraxylene
(PX) plant, a 350,000-t/y polypropylene (PP) unit and an aromatics extraction
unit with 300,000 t/y of capacity.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks
for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to
MRC's DataScope
report, PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year
on year and reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted
for the greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia
increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months
of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase
in imports.
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