State-owned Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) has awarded a $236.3m contract for residue hydrocracking unit services to US-based Advanced Refining Technologies (ART).

ART is a joint venture (JV) of US energy company Chevron and US speciality chemicals and materials company Grace.

Under the five-year contract, ART will provide full-cycle catalyst management (FCM) services for a Bapco residue hydrocracking unit known as 1RHCU.

Bapco received commercial bids for the contract in August 2020.

1RHCU is one of the key components of the under-execution Bapco modernisation programme (BMP), through which Bapco aims to boost the processing capacity of Bahrain’s only oil refinery at Sitra from 267,000 barrels a day (b/d) to 380,000 b/d.

The unit is powered by technology licensed from Chevron Lummus Global (CLG), a joint venture of Chevron and Lummus Technology.

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The BMP includes a two-train RHCU with a processing capacity of 65,000 b/d.

Less than a dozen of these units exist globally, and Bapco’s 1RHCU will be among the largest in the world.

The plot size for 1RHCU is approximately 260m by 260m, the equivalent of almost 10 football pitches.

The RHCU will convert 78% of the vacuum residue feed into intermediate products, which will then be further processed into high margin kerosene and diesel.

The main engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) package of the BMP is worth $4.2bn and is currently under execution.

In December 2017, Bapco formally awarded the main contract to a consortium led by France’s Technip FMC, and including Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas and South Korea’s Samsung Engineering, to perform the EPC works to upgrade Bahrain’s main Sitra refinery.

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This article is published by MEED, the world’s leading source of business intelligence about the Middle East. MEED provides exclusive news, data and analysis on the Middle East every day. For access to MEED’s Middle East business intelligence, subscribe here.