Abu Dhabi’s Borouge petchems joint venture of Adnoc and Austria’s Borealis has licensed proprietary technology from France’s Axens for a methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) gasoline additive facility and other units to be built within the Borouge-4 petrochemicals complex at Ruwais. Axens will provide the technologies for a 124,000 t/y MTBE and 50,000 t/y 1-butene unit, a 75,000 t/y 1-hexene unit and hydrogenation units for C3, C4 and pyrolisis gasoline streams.

Borouge-4 will be centered around the world’s largest mixed-feed cracker, producing up to 1.8mn t/y of ethylene, and a 1.5mn t/y aromatics plant. While Borouge has yet to announce the configuration of the units downstream of the cracker and aromatics plant, they will include polyolefins and perhaps elastomers given that butadiene will be an intermediate product. Borouge-4 is part of Adnoc’s $45bn plan to turn Ruwais into the world’s largest refining and petchems hub, with respective capacities of 1.5mn b/d and 14.4mn t/y by 2025 (MEES, 1 March 2019). (CONTINUED - 167 WORDS)