Front end engineering design work for Duqm Petrochemical Project suspended

Business Tuesday 03/November/2020 17:59 PM
By: Times News Service
Front end engineering design work for Duqm Petrochemical Project suspended

Muscat: The Duqm Refinery and Petrochemicals Industries Company (DRPIC) has announced the suspension of the Front End Engineering Design (FEED) work for its proposed Duqm Petrochemical Project (DPP), as it seeks to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the DPP’s economics.

The Duqm Petrochemical Project is the second stage of the integrated refinery and petrochemical complex planned by DRPIC in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm in Oman, which comes as part of the strategic partnership between OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International.

The DRPIC board said that the suspension of the project’s FEED is in the best interests of the company during a time of unprecedented global economic uncertainty due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, depressed demand, and highly volatile commodity prices.  

The shareholders intend to reevaluate the project against the current challenging global market environment and to seek opportunities to enhance the value of the project.
Construction work on the Duqm Refinery project, meanwhile, continues to progress toward completion and the current overall progress stands at 72 per cent.

Announced in 2019, the Duqm Petrochemical Project is a strategic partnership between OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International. The DPP aimed to produce new, advanced chemical products for the first time in Oman, including Ethylene Glycols, Oxo Chemicals and Butadiene. The addition of these chemical products serves to diversify the existing petrochemical portfolio of both shareholders and complement their product portfolio with cleaner, more cost-efficient, and technically superior chemical products.

The DPP was aimed to be constructed next to the Duqm Refinery in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, located in the Al Wusta Governorate in Oman.