Page 10 - DMEA Week 07 2023

DMEA PETROCHEMICALS DMEA

Pump repaired at Masjid

Suleiman urea plant

IRAN A high-pressure condensate pump at Iran’s Mas- China owed Iran over $20bn in oil payments
jid Suleiman Urea plant has been repaired fol- around the time the project was conceived, and
lowing months of shut down, returning the unit funding for the project was initially frozen in
to full capacity. overseas banks after US sanctions made transfers
The director of the 1.073mn tonne per year of money to Tehran from Beijing difficult. A deal
(tpy) complex in Khuzestan Province, Hossein was made to allow China to re-pay some parts
Salehinia said: “This pump, which was 100% of the frozen funds through China’s funding of
made abroad, was not able to provide opera- Iranian petrochemical projects, such as Majid
tional service a few months ago.” Suleiman.
“According to the technical reviews inside Such funds were used to finance an engineer-
the complex and the quality assessment of some ing, procurement and construction (EPC) con-
manufacturers in the country, this pump was tract for Japan’s Toyo Engineering Corp., China’s
generally made in the country,” he added, not- Wuhan Petrochemical, Switzerland’s Casale SA
ing: “In this project, about 45% of the cost of the and Iran’s Petrochemical Industries Design and
foreign sample of this pump has been saved.” Engineering Co. (PIDEC) to complete construc-
Along with urea, the plant produces 660,000 tion of the complex.
tpy of ammonia and is fed by 861mn cubic Media reports suggest that investment was
metres (mcm) per day of natural gas, extracted provided by the China Eximbank with the
from the nearby Zilayee gas field. Funded by bank’s vice president reporting in 2017 that it
an un-named Chinese investor with a loan of had “financed 26 electricity, petrochemical, oil
RMB4.1bn ($602mn), construction on the plant and gas and nonferrous metal projects in Iran
first began in July 2011. worth $9bn”.™

P10 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 07 16•February•2023