Aramco Mulls Indian Refinery in Plan to Boost Asia Footprint
The world’s largest crude exporter plans to invest in Asian refineries to ensure it has plenty of buyers in
the fastest-growing region for fuel demand.
Saudi Arabian Oil Co. is adding India to the list of Asian countries where it intends to build new refineries
as part of a plan to almost double its global refining capacity, Chief Executive Officer Amin Nasser told
Bloomberg in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco, as the company is known, is also considering plants in
China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The Dhahran-based company is considering expanding its refining capacity to find new outlets for Saudi
crude oil, Nasser said Tuesday in a speech during a Saudi refining conference in Jubail.
The company already owns a stake in a refinery in China’s Fujian province along with Exxon Mobil Corp.
and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. It’s still in talks with another partner, China National Petroleum
Corp., to build a new joint-venture refinery. “Talks are good and ongoing,” he said.
Aramco has a refining capacity of around 5.4 million barrels a day now, and it will almost double that to
between 8 million and 10 million, he said, without specifying a time frame for the expansion. Saudi
Arabia produced 10.2 million barrels of oil a day in February, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Aramco’s natural gas output of more than 12 billion cubic feet a day will almost double in 10 years,
Nasser said.
In Saudi Arabia, the company is now considering whether to add more petrochemical plants to its
existing refineries. The company is close to finishing a petrochemical plant within its joint refinery with
Japan’s Sumitomo Chemical Co Ltd in Rabigh. Aramco is also studying a similar plan at Ras Tanura, its
largest refinery in Saudi Arabia that has the capacity to refine 550,000 barrels of oil a day, Nasser said.
The company is testing technology to turn crude directly into chemical products, he said.