Oman Oil Refineries & Petroleum Industries Co. (Orpic) has invited global firms to bid on an engineering, procurement, and construction contract for an installation to store and handle petroleum coke (petcoke) that will be produced following completion of a multibillion dollar modernization project under way its Sohar refinery, about 230 km northwest of the Omani capital of Muscat (OGJ Online, Nov. 25, 2013; Mar. 4, 2011).
The grassroots storage and handling facility, which will be built at the nearby Omani port of Sohar, is to consist of two reinforced cement concrete (RCC) silos, each with a petcoke storage capacity of 30,000 tonnes, as well as associated structures and equipment for receiving, conveying, loading, and unloading petcoke volumes along the production, storage, and export chain, from refinery to ship, according to tender documents released on Mar. 31.
The contract award will include detailed design and engineering, procurement and supply of materials, installation and construction activities, as well as testing and commissioning of the proposed storage and handling unit.
Additionally, the winning bidder will be required to execute the contract in the mode of a lumpsum turnkey contract, Orpic said.
Final bid packages are due to Orpic by May 4, before 11 a.m., Oman time.
This latest tender comes as part of a series of projects intended to support Orpic’s Sohar Refinery Improvement Project (SRIP), a brownfield project that includes major technical improvements to the existing refinery (OGJ Online, May 1, 2014).
Designed to improve the plant’s ability to overcome existing technical constraints associated with processing the changing quality of Oman Export Blend (OEB) crude, SRIP also will enable the refinery to meet international environmental standards, serve growing domestic demand for refined products, and enhance the refinery’s competitiveness and profitability, Orpic said.
As part of the project, SRIP will improve the residue fluidized catalytic cracker (RFCC) unit feed quality to meet design parameters, meet the polymer-grade propylene demand of the polypropylene plant, maximize additional gasoline and diesel production, ensure that all fuel products from the refinery conform with Euro IV norms and meet current product specifications where these are better than Euro IV, produce naphtha for the aromatics plant, and equip the refinery to produce bitumen and petcoke (OGJ Online, July 18, 2014).
In addition to the revamped RFCC, the SRIP will involve integrating five units at the refinery, including a hydrocracker and coker, which will boost crude throughputs by 70% by adding 82,000 b/d of OEB crude oil processing capacity to achieve a total refining capacity of 198,000 b/d compared with its current capacity of 116,400 b/d.
Once completed, SRIP will eliminate fuel oil yields from the refinery entirely as well as increase the plant’s product yields for diesel (90%), gasoline (37%), jet fuel (93%), LPG (91%), naphtha (175%), and propylene (44%).
As of January, physical progress on SRIP’s EPC-related activities had reached 41.4%, and the project remains on schedule for commissioning in 2016, Orpic said in a Mar. 17 statement.
