Egypt’s Assiut Oil Refining to upgrade refinery – contractor

LONDON (ICIS)–Egypt’s Assiut Oil Refining Company (ASORC) plans to upgrade its refinery, located 400km south of Cairo, French petrochemicals engineering firm Axens said on Tuesday.

Axens, which won a contract for the project, said that the upgrade will include the addition of a complex for the production of high octane gasoline.

Axens will supply technologies for a naphtha hydrotreater, a continuous catalytic reformer, and a C5/C6 isomerization unit with deisohexanizer recycle unit, it said.

In addition, it will provide catalysts, adsorbents, equipment and technical support.

“The capacity of the project is 660,000 tonnes/year of naphtha processed,” it added.

The refinery’s existing processing capacity stands at 4.5m tonnes/year of distillation crude.

Financial details or timelines for the upgrade’s construction and completion were not disclosed.

ASORC is subsidiary of Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation.