APIC ’11: Shell hopes to seal project deal with Qatar Petroleum

FUKUOKA, JAPAN (ICIS)–Shell Chemicals hopes to sign a binding heads of agreement with Qatar Petroleum on a joint-venture petrochemical project in Ras Laffan sometime this year, a company executive said on Friday.

Once the heads of agreement has been signed, the project will move into the front-end engineering and design (FEED) stage, said Iain John Lo, vice president for new business development and ventures at Shell Chemicals.

The project includes a cracker, with capacity of slightly less than 1m tonnes/year, and two 750,000 tonne/year monoethylene glycol (MEG) plants that will use Shell’s OMEGA technology, said Lo on the sidelines of the Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC) 2011 in Fukuoka, Japan.

In December last year, Shell and Qatar Petroleum signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop the project in Qatar.

Start-up of the complex is expected to be in 2016-17, he said.

“We are looking at several options for making use of the ethylene that will not be consumed by the MEG facilities, but we are not ready to disclose the details at the moment,” added Sven Royall, vice president of global intermediates at Shell Chemicals.

Lo said that a substantial portion of the ethane feed for the cracker project would come from Shell’s Pearl gas-to-liquids (GTL) project in Qatar, which is in the process of being commissioned.

Ethane needs to be separated from the gas stream before it is fed into the GTL plant.

Additional reporting by Tahir Ikram