Saudi Aramco approves SATORP, Motiva expansion plans

State-owned Saudi Aramco's board of directors have approved two major downstream expansion projects in the Kingdom and the US.

The board gave its nod last Sunday for SATORP expansion project with France's Total SA as well as the funding for its front-end engineering and design (FEED), the oil major said in the Arabian Sun, its weekly in-house magazine.

In April, Aramco and Total announced plans to build a new petrochemicals facility next to the 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) SATORP complex at Jubail.

The new project will comprise a world-size mixed-feed steam cracker (50 percent ethane and refinery off-gas) with a capacity of 1.5 million tons per year of ethylene and related high-added-value petrochemical units.

Separately, the board also approved the funding request for chemicals capacity expansion at Aramco’s US subsidiary Motiva Enterprises.

In April, Motiva signed two agreements, worth $8 billion to $10 billion, with Honeywell UOP and TechnipFMC to evaluate technologies for a mixed-feed cracker, and benzene and paraxylene production.