Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Petrochemical Group will be investing $50 million to build a benzene recovery plant at Al-Jubail, according to a statement from Jacobs Engineering Group.

Jacobs will be providing the front-end engineering services.
The new facility will produce approximately 15,000 tonnes per year (tpy) of benzene and 2,500 tpy of toluene using extractive distillation technology.
Once onstream, which is scheduled at the end of 2008, the new benzene recovery unit will provide 50 per cent of the feedstock to Al Rajhi’s existing 30,000 tpy linear alkyl benzene (LAB) plant.
LAB is a synthetic detergent component.