A senior official of Saudi Aramco disclosed today that his company has embarked on building three fully-transformative refineries at a 400,000 bpd each. Eng. Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al-Falih, Saudi Aramco's President and Senior Executive Officer, disclosed that the company is building the refineries in Jazan, Satorp, a joint venture with Total, and Yaserf, a joint venture with Sonic, in addition to building or expanding two world-class chemical complexes: Sadara complex, a joint venture with Daewoo Chemical and Petro Rabegh complex, a joint venture with Somitomo Chemical. In a key address at the Middle East Conference for Refining and Petrochemicals 'Petrotech 2014', currently ongoing in Manama, Bahrain, under the patronage of Saudi Aramco under the theme 'Towards a prosperous transformative industry amid a new situation ', Al-Falih summarized the historic opportunities available for the refining and petrochemical industries in the Arab Gulf region and ways of investing them. Over the last three decades, the Arab Gulf region has exported low-price petrochemical materials and imported a variety of technologies, instead of adding the maximum values for hydro carbonic material through more diversification and appropriation of products, a move that would have enabled the producers to establish secondary and specialized industries and produce export-oriented manufactures and semi-manufactured goods, he said. Eng. Al-Falih added that the best way to obtain the real value of our transformative industries in the region is to secure a doubled economic output of added-value industrial complexes and areas as well as knowledge-based research and developing activities, a step that guarantees the achievement of the three goals of development: a strong economic growth, industrial base diversification and creation of job opportunities. He cited five pillars for success of transformative industries in our region as follows: building giant labs for refining and chemicals, linking the upstream and downstream industries, locating those utilities in the vicinity of major markets, the operational excellence through improving the cost and increasing the creditability, and use of advanced technology.
