South Korea’s GS Engineering and Construction Corp has won a $1.14 billion contract to build a refinery for Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Co (Takreer).

GS will build a low-sulphur diesel plant at Ruwais after submitting the lowest bid for the scheme last year.
The contract includes construction of a 37,000-barrel per day (bpd) hydrocracker and a 42,000 bpd sulphur unit and is part of a scheme to produce more environmentally-friendly oil products.
Takreer, Finland’s Neste Oil and Austria’s OMV plan to build a plant in Abu Dhabi to make base oil, the main element in lubricants.
The joint venture, which aims to build the plant with an annual capacity of 500,000 tonnes and to capitalise on growing demand for high-performance base oils, would be 60 per cent owned by Takreer, 20 per cent by Neste Oil and 20 per cent by OMV.
Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (Takreer) is a unit of state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc). Takreer’s hydrocracker would supply the feedstock for the base oil unit.
Neste’s speciality products head Kimmo Rahkamo said the plant, at Ruwais in western Abu Dhabi, would begin operations in 2012, if all goes as initially planned, but that the value of the investment was unclear as it was still early days.
“The planning starts in the summer and it is about a one-year process. After that we will know how big an investment it would be and if it is worth doing,” Rahkamo says.
“The building is then a two to three-year project.”
Planning of the project would start in the second quarter of 2008 at the latest, Neste says.
Neste says its earlier project to build base oil production in Bahrain was also progressing and Rahkamo said Neste would aim to make a possible investment decision by the middle of 2008, when the cost estimates are clearer.
“Thereafter, it should be ready in a couple of years,” Rahkamo says.
Takreer has been continuously working to strengthen its core value to provide safe, healthy and environmentally friendly operation/hydrocarbon products.
To this end, and in line with worldwide trend to market transportation fuels with improved quality specifications, Takreer had initiated a two-stage programme to achieve the environmentally friendly goal of providing cleaner fuels. Transportation fuels are defined as gasoline, jet-fuel and diesel or gas oil hydrocarbon products, the company says.
The first stage of the programme has been implemented through the unleaded gasoline/low sulphur gas oil (ULG/LSGO) projects in Abu Dhabi refinery and Ruwais refinery (22 and 250 km respectively from Abu Dhabi) both owned and operated by Takreer.
The new blending and storage facilities in Abu Dhabi Refinery are at the National Petroleum Construction Company (NPCC) of Abu Dhabi.
Technip Italy is implementing the more significant expansion in Ruwais Refinery through installation of state-of-the-art licensed units for increased production of unleaded gasoline and low sulphur gas oil (diesel). Commercial production of these products started during the third quarter of 2005. 
Takreer had undertaken a project for Adnoc and its group of companies that involves the effective disposal of waste. The project named BEAAT aimed to manage all the dangerous waste products produced by Adnoc and its group of companies by utilising the latest technologies for treatment of hazardous waste in accordance with international standards. The project consisted of establishing a complete hazardous waste treatment facility, which complies with the IFA and the US Environment Protection Agency standards.
The operation relied heavily on stabilising and neutralising the negative effects of solid waste through chemical treatment by combining such wastes with cement to produce concrete blocks that can be buried in a safe manner, at varied depths.