Media: Saudi Aramco scrapped joint venture plan with Petronas

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Saudi Aramco has given up plans to joint venture with Malaysia’s Petronas to run the $20.1 billion refinery and petrochemical integrated development project (RAPID) in Johor. The oil giant said RAPID would not generate sufficient return after careful feasibility study.

Meanwhile, the RAPDID complex has reached the halfway point and is on track to start-up in first quarter 2019. Earlier, Petronas offered 50 per cent stake to Saudi Aramco would the partnership successfully establish.

RAPID is built to process 300,000 barrel of crude a day alongside with a world scale petrochemical complex that houses a 3 millions tons/year naphtha cracker, 900,000 tons/year PP unit, 400,000 tons/year HDPE unit. The company also mulls over putting up a C6-based metallocene PE plant and a LDPE/EVA swing plant at the same complex with respective capacity of 350,000 tons/year and 150,000 tons/year.