Page 6 - AfrOil Week 02 2020

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Sonatrach awards $3.7bn refinery deal to Spanish-Korean consortium
ALGERIA
ALGERIA’S national oil company (NOC) Sonatrach has awarded a $3.7bn contract for work on a new grassroots oil refinery to a joint venture (JV) formed by South Korea’s Samsung Engineering and Spain’s Técnicas Reunidas.
Equity in the JV will be split 55% to Técnicas Reunidas and 45% to Samsung Engineering. The Spanish company will serve as the leader of the project.
In a statement, Sonatrach said the contract provided for the venture to carry out engineer- ing, procurement and construction (EPC) ser- vices for the project. It also reported that the partners were slated to build an oil-processing plant with a design capacity of 5mn tonnes per year (100,000 barrels per day, or bpd) at Haoud El Hamra, a village within the Hassi-Messaoud district of Ouargla Province.
The Algerian NOC stated that the project would take 52 months to complete. The facility is due to begin operating in the first half of 2024, it added.
Técnicas Reunidas said in its own statement that it would work with Samsung Engineering
to build the refinery together with all of the sec- ondary processing facilities needed to achieve deep conversion and to turn out clean fuels that meet modern emissions standards.
The plant will be outfitted with a crude dis- tillation unit (CDU), a catalytic reformer unit, a solvent de-asphalting unit, a hydrocracking unit, a diesel hydrodesulphurisation unit, a naphtha hydroprocessing unit and an isomer- isation unit, it said.
Additionally, it said, the refinery will include a wastewater treatment plant, a sulphur recovery unit and an amine recovery unit. These facilities will help ensure that the plant meets the relevant environmental requirements, it explained.
Sonatrach drew up plans for the Hassi-Mes- saoud plant within the framework of a wider campaign to expand Algeria’s domestic refining capacity by 15mn tpy (300,000 bpd). The pro- gramme calls for the construction of three 5mn tpy (100,000 bpd) facilities capable of process- ing oil extracted from Algerian fields. The other grassroots refineries are supposed to be built in Biskra and Tiaret. ™
NNPC head: Nigeria will focus on condensate production
PRODUCTION
NIGERIA
MELE Kyari, the group managing director of Nigerian National Petroleum Co. (NNPC), said at the weekend that his country was taking a new approach to compliance with the production quotas set by OPEC and its allies.
Specifically, he commented on the sidelines of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, Nigeria is paying close attention to the fact that the quota system applies only to crude oil and not to other liquid hydrocarbons, such as gas condensate.
“You can produce condensate, which is not part of the OPEC commitments,” he told jour- nalists in Abu Dhabi. “We are focusing our pro- duction to more gas-based reservoirs so that we can continue to grow our production while maintaining balance in the market.”
Kyari indicated that Nigeria had followed this path in December, when the country’s output
totalled 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd). He declined to say how much of the total had been condensate.
NNPC head Mele Kyari (Photo: NNPC)
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w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 02 15•January•2020