Aramco pushes crude-to-chemicals frontiers

A trio of major project announcements signal the Saudi heavyweight’s renewed focus on maximising petchems yield

A brief post on the local Tadawul stock exchange by Saudi Aramco’s petrochemicals subsidiary Sabic in late November revealed the resurrection of potentially one of the most-significant projects in either firm’s history: the development of a huge crude-oil-to-chemicals (COTC) complex on the Kingdom’s east coast. Just a week earlier, the parent company’s South Korean joint venture, S-Oil, announced FID on a similar scheme first formally mooted five years ago—again designed to maximise the chemical yield from each barrel of oil. And plans for a more traditional refinery/petchems integration in Poland served to hammer home the message of a renewed Aramco push further downstream. The firm’s state