Business

Monday December 10, 2007

Sinopec-Kuwait joint venture nod



CHINA has approved Sinopec Corp’s US$5bil joint venture oil refinery and petrochemical project with Kuwait Petroleum Corp in the south China’s Guangdong Province.

The project will have an annual ethylene capacity of one million tonnes, according to a brief statement carried online by Sinopecnews.

Ethylene is a basic petrochemical building block.

However, the statement did not specify the size of the refinery. while Sinopec officials had said earlier that the plant would process 12 million tonnes of crude oil from Kuwait a year and expected it to come on stream in 2010.

China’s top industry planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, has approved the project, the statement said.

Accordingly, Sinopec will end a 800,000-tonne-a-year ethylene expansion project in its Guangzhou unit, near the proposed Nansha plant. The existing 200,000-tonne-a-year ethylene cracker at the Guangzhou unit would be closed when the new project started, it added.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc and China National Offshore Oil Corp started in 2005 a US$4.3bil project in nearby Nanhai, also in Guangdong, a key manufacturing hub.

And in March, Sinopec also agreed to a refinery, petrochemical and petrol station project in Fujian Province with Exxon Mobil Corp and Saudi Aramco involving a total investment of US$5bil.

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