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THE BRIEFING
Digitisation
Mapping the Future MIDDLE EAST
Big Project ME learns how Saudi Aramco is working with survey specialist GCS to blueprint critical refinery upgrades
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audi Aramco is one of the largest and most profitable company in the world – its revenues in 2018 topped $356 billion. It is also the most valuable business ever created, with its worth in 2019 estimated to be more than $1.39 trillion. Having developed the world’s largest single hydrocarbon network, the Master Gas System, Saudi Aramco owns the world’s largest onshore and offshore oil fields - the Ghawar and Safaniya fields. October 2020 | MEConstructionNews.com
Since 1945, one of the lynchpins in its output has been the Ras Tanura refinery, the oldest refinery on the Persian Gulf coast, located south of the modern industrial port city of Jubail. Undeniably part of the region’s industrial culture, the refinery has seen many changes and modernisation initiatives - leading to its present scale, which features a crude distillation capacity of 550,000 barrels per day. Major facilities at the refinery complex include a 325,000bpd crude distillation unit, a 225,000bpd gas condensate distillation unit and a 50,000bpd hydrocracker. It also has a 270,000bpd catalytic reforming plant, along with an NGL industrial unit. Modernisation projects include major upgrades in 1984 and 1999 - when a diglycol amine (DGA) regeneration plant and sour water stripper were added - and an extensive Clean Fuels and Aromatics project begun in 2013. Currently, significant plant development and expansion is underway, not only set to improve scale and operational efficiency, but meaning that Ras Tanura is on the
way to becoming a showcase of Saudi Aramco’s environmental commitments. It will not only align with the Kingdom’s stringent new emissions requirements but will in effect become a global flagship of ‘clean’ refinery operation. MEETING NEW REQUIREMENTS
Ras Tanura currently operates three Sulfur Recovery Units (SRUs), which convert toxic hydrogen sulfide (H2S) recovered from the refinery process into the less harmful elemental sulfur - via the Claus Process - and emitting any unconverted H2S, COS, CS2 as sulfur dioxide (SO2). SO2 is classified as a major air pollutant with significant impacts on human health and the environment. In June 2014, Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Meteorology & Environmental Protection (GAMEP) revised the in-Kingdom emissions limit for SO2 to 400 mg/Nm3. Currently, the air emissions from each SRU represent a sulfur recovery efficiency of 95-97%. But now, in order to comply with the new GAMEP regulations, the sulfur recovery efficiency at each SRU will have to be increased to approximately 99.95%.
Modernisation plans Significant plant development and expansion is underway at the Ras Tanura refinery as part of its modernisation plans.
Untangling the web GCS has been employed to help locate the web of underground utilities at the Ras Tanura refinery.
2013
Start of the Clean Fuels and Aromatics project