MOSCOW (MRC) -- Iraq inaugurates project to increase and green Basra refinery output, as per press release at Government of Iraq.
Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi on Sunday laid the cornerstone for a project set to increase the South Refineries Company (SRC) production capacity in Iraq’s key Basra Port while also working towards greater environmental sustainability.
“This project will increase our production capacity by 55,000 barrels per day,” Al-Kadhimi noted during the ceremony, “and give us oil products without leaving us with large volumes of low-value oil”.
The project will build the Continuous Catalytic Cracker (CCR) and Naphtha Hydrotreating (NHT) units. The contract was signed in October between SRC and Iraq’s Ministry of Oil with Japan’s JGC Corporation.
The project is funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as part of an official development assistance loan project. According to a JICA statement issued last year, the project to build Iraq’s first-ever Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) complex will increase Iraq’s potential to produce a larger volume of high-value products and promote the transfer of refining technologies from Japan.
The new plant will also reduce sulfur content in the oil products in line with environmental standards. "We must all create an attractive environment for investment and foreign companies, in order to increase the number of construction and development projects across the entire country" Al-Kadhimi stressed.
The project will improve overall efficiency of the Basrah refinery operations, and it will increase Iraq’s gasoline and diesel supplies, along with other oil products, thus reducing the need for importing refined products. It includes building a new refining plant, adjacent to the existing refinery facility, French petrochemicals technologies company Axens said in an update. Axens will provide catalysts and adsorbents, key technology features, such as proprietary equipment, trainings and technical services.
As MRC informed earlier, The Baltic Chemical Complex (BHK), a subsidiary of JSC Rusgazdobycha, and the international company Axens signed an agreement on the supply of technology for the production of alpha-olefins used for the production of polyethylene.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 241,030 tonnes in January 2021 versus 217,890 tonnes a year earlier. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market reached 141,870 tonnes in January 2021 versus 123,520 tonnes a year earlier. Supply of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased.
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