DHAHRAN, 10 May 2004 — A huge security operation is in place to ensure normal operations at oil facilities and protect personnel, the head of Saudi Aramco said yesterday, dismissing the recent attack on a petrochemical facility as an isolated incident.
“Our facilities are protected by technology, by physical barriers, by cameras. We have over 5,000 security guards,” Abdullah Jumah told reporters after signing a petrochemical development deal with Japanese firm Sumitomo Chemical. “Over and above that, we have government security,” the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.
A shooting rampage in a petrochemical complex in Yanbu earlier this month claimed the lives of five Western engineers working with ABB Lummus and a National Guard officer. The attack came 10 days after a car bomb at a security forces building in Riyadh killed six people and wounded 145 others.
“In terms of the security of our people and our facilities, we have not been reactive. We have always been active... We have a huge security organization in the Kingdom,” Jumah said.
Saudi Aramco said in the aftermath of the Yanbu attack it had not been affected by the incident and that operations were continuing as normal at all its facilities.
“These are individual” incidents, Jumah said of the Yanbu attack. “It is unfortunate that they happen, but they do happen. We cannot take one incident and say that this situation (applies) all over the Kingdom,” he said.
Saudi Aramco employs some 54,000 people, including around 2,300 US and Canadian citizens, and about 1,100 Europeans.
The deal with Sumitomo sets the stage for the development of a $4.3-billion refining and petrochemical complex on the Red Sea.
Kick-off of the project, targeted for start-up in late 2008, “sends a powerful message that this country is secure and stable,” said Jumah.
The agreement shows the investment climate in Saudi Arabia remains “very strong,” Jumah told reporters after signing it with his Sumitomo Chemical counterpart, Hiromasa Yonekura, at Aramco headquarters in Dhahran.
The complex in Rabigh “will be the largest such facility ever built at a single stroke, and continues Saudi Aramco’s tradition of developing... and operating massive industrial megaprojects,” Jumah said.
Yonekura, whose company is Japan’s second-largest chemical manufacturer, said security was “of utmost importance,” but his concerns related to the Middle East as a whole rather than the Yanbu attack.
“We are concerned about what’s going on in the Middle East... I think the Yanbu incident is a kind of isolated event... Of course, we have to rely on the government to (maintain the) pressure to keep terrorist movements under control,” he said. Saudi Arabia is Japan’s major supplier of crude oil.
The memorandum of understanding signed yesterday features as the next step a joint feasibility study into the project to produce a total of 2.2 million tons of olefins, along with large volumes of gasoline and other refined products, Saudi Aramco said.
“The bedrock of this agreement is the development of our Rabigh refinery into a world-class integrated refining and petrochemical complex,” Jumah said.
“The cost for the direct project investment is currently estimated to be $4.3 billion. However, this estimate is subject to change based on the results of the joint feasibility study,” Saudi Aramco said in a statement.
Building on the existing site and infrastructure of the Rabigh refinery, initial plans envisage setting up a high-olefins-yield fluid catalytic cracker complex integrated with a world-scale, ethane-based cracker, producing approximately 1.3 million tons per year of ethylene, 900,000 tons per year of propylene, and 80,000 bpd of gasoline as well as other refined products.
