Germany’s Linde has set up a joint venture with Adnoc for the production and long-term supply of industrial gases to customers there, it said.

Gases and engineering group Linde said in a statement it held 49 per cent of the venture, named Elixier, and that Adnoc owned the remaining 51 per cent.
“This joint venture is of major strategic importance to us and is the logical expansion of the previous collaboration of our engineering division with Adnoc in the petrochemical industry,” Linde executive board member Aldo Belloni said.
Adnoc had access to about 90 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s oil and gas reserves, considered the fourth-largest in the world, Belloni said.
In the first phase of the joint venture, the companies will build a $65 million air-separation plant in the industrial zone of Ruwais.
The new plant will supply nitrogen from the end of 2009 to industrial customers in Ruwais and will also produce liquefied nitrogen and oxygen.
Adnoc is also the majority shareholder in the joint venture company Borouge, which produces polyethylene in Ruwais.
In November 2006, when Borouge was seeking to expand its production facilities, Linde was awarded a major contract to build one of the largest ethylene crackers in the world, with a production capacity of 1,500,000 tonnes of ethylene per annum.
The Linde Group is a world-leading gases and engineering company with around 50,000 employees working in more than 70 countries worldwide.