LINDE TO BUILD CO2 UTILIZATION PLANT IN SAUDI ARABIA

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/23/13

The Linde Group has snagged a contract to build a carbon capture and utilization plant in Saudi Arabia, the German engineering and industrial gas firm confirmed late this week. The company said it will oversee engineering, procurement and construction of the world’s largest CO2 purification and liquefaction plant for Jubail United Petrochemical Company, an affiliate of the petrochemical giant Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC), to be located in Jubail Industrial City on the Persian Gulf.

Linde said the plant, which will be constructed on a fast-track schedule by 2015, will compress and purify roughly 1,500 tonnes of CO2 per day from two nearby ethylene glycol plants. From there, the CO2 will be piped to three SABIC affiliates for enhanced methanol and urea fertilizer production. Linde said the facility will purify about half a million tonnes a year of CO2 and that it is also capable of producing up to 200 tonnes of CO2 per day for use in the food and beverage industry. “It will add to SABIC’s business portfolio of industrial gas products,” Yousef Al-Zamel, executive vice president of SABIC’s chemicals strategic business unit, said in a statement. “This is the first of many other similar projects to be executed next year.”

The contract is a big one for Linde, which also has an EPC contract to help construct Summit Power Group’s Texas Clean Energy Project in the west Permian Basin. Summit has also hinted that it could use Linde as a contractor if it moves forward with building similar poly-generation plants in west Texas in the future.