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Saudi Arabia's Rabigh Refining & Petrochemical Company (Petro Rabigh) has awarded US-based consultant KBR a 10-year contract to provide maintenance services covering the company’s polymer plants in Rabigh, on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast.

“This [contract award] marks a major step in Petro Rabigh’s transformation journey, supporting safer operations, stronger reliability and long-term improvement across its facilities,” Petro Rabigh said in a post on social media platform LinkedIn, without providing further details.

Work on the operations and maintenance contract will be executed by KBR’s Technology Led Industrial Solutions business line, which operates under the Houston-headquartered firm’s Technology Solutions portfolio, sources told MEED.

Prior to this contract, in March 2024, Petro Rabigh awarded KBR a similar five-year asset condition monitoring programme contract. As part of that job, KBR is to provide predictive maintenance services at Petro Rabigh’s main plant.

Petro Rabigh was originally established in 1989 as a basic topping refinery with crude oil processing facilities, located in Rabigh, 165 kilometres to the north of Jeddah in Mecca Province.

Saudi Aramco and Japan’s Sumitomo Chemical Company formed an equal joint venture in 2005 to transform the Petro Rabigh crude oil refining complex into an integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex, with the strategic objective of expanding Saudi Arabia’s annual production capacity of refined products and petrochemicals.

Three years after the creation of the Petro Rabigh joint venture, the partners floated 25% of its shares in an initial public offering on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) in 2008, following which Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical each held 37.5% shares in Petro Rabigh, with the remaining shares listing on the Tadawul.

In October last year, however, Aramco completed the acquisition of an additional 22.5% stake in Petro Rabigh from Sumitomo Chemical. Following the completion of the transaction, valued at $702m or SR7 a share, Aramco became the majority shareholder in Petro Rabigh, with an equity stake of 60%, while Sumitomo retains an interest of 15%. The remaining 25% shares of Petro Rabigh continue to trade on the Tadawul.

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Following the formation of the Petro Rabigh joint venture in 2005, Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical launched the expansion of the refining facility into an integrated refining and petrochemicals complex in 2006, investing $9.8bn in the project, 60% of which was secured through external financing. Engineering, procurement and construction works on phase one were completed in 2009, with the integrated downstream complex entering operations in November of that year.

The Petro Rabigh downstream complex consists of a topping refinery that has a 340,000 barrel-a-day (b/d) crude distillation unit, a 47,000 b/d hydrotreater, a 12 million cubic-feet-a-day hydrogen plant, a 75,000 b/d naphtha merox unit and a 60,000 b/d kerosene merox unit, along with supporting utilities, product tankage and a marine terminal.

Aramco and Sumitomo Chemical initiated Petro Rabigh’s phase two expansion project, valued at $8bn, in 2014. The second expansion phase was commissioned in 2018 and added 15 chemicals plants to the Petro Rabigh complex, raising the facility’s total production capacity to 18.4 million tonnes a year (t/y) of petroleum-based products.  

The expansion also increased Petro Rabigh’s capacity to process an additional 30 million cubic feet a year of ethane into 2.4 million t/y of ethylene and propylene-based derivatives, and achieved a naphtha output of 3 million t/y.

Expansion of the main existing chemicals plant and the establishment of a clean fuels complex comprising polyether polyols, naphtha treating and sulphur recovery units were also part of the phase two project.

Photo credit: Petro Rabigh on LinkedIn