Petro Rabigh
Source of picture: arabianoilandgas.com
By John Richardson
Petro Rabigh’s attempt to move further down the value chain raises interesting questions over exactly how successful the Saudi joint venture will be in attracting the necessary investment.
As my fellow blogger Malini Hariharan wrote earlier this week, plans for the second phase of Petro Rabigh include paraxylene (PX) to be consumed locally in downstream purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plants.
Other proposed investments include a methyl tertiary butyl ether(MTBE)/isobutylene facility.
Another project in Saudi Arabia was also originally scheduled to include an MTBE/isobutylene plant as part of an integrated C4s derivatives complex. However, the prospective investor in the complex withdrew when it calculated a rate of return of below 10%, the blog was recently told.
“A leading management consultancy recently conducted a study which showed that rates of return decline progressively the further you move downstream from the cracker in all of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries,” an industry source told us yesterday.
“It still makes a lot of sense to build basic polyethylene (PE) and mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) facilities in the region, if – and this is a big IF – you can get access to attractively-priced ethane,” he added.
GCC governments might be able to lavish generous investment incentives on companies in order to encourage the kind of downstream petrochemicals investment (all the way down to the processor level) that helps to alleviate high levels of unemployment.
But as we’ve mentioned before investment incentives are one thing and efficiency of operations are entirely another. Investors face the choice of building in the GCC or in Asia – which is much-closer to final consumption markets where labour costs are also a lot lower.