Kuwait Integrated Petroleum Industries Company (KIPIC) Al-Zour refinery project

What is the Al-Zour refinery project?

The Al-Zour refinery project was a greenfield, environmentally driven project and part of Kuwait’s National Development Plan. The plan sets out the nation’s long-term development priorities, including the aim to position the country as a global hub for the refining and petrochemicals industry.

This project was an ambitious world-scale project delivering a new grassroots, state-of-the-art refinery, with the flexibility to refine a wide range of crude oils and for future development into an integrated refinery and petrochemical complex.

The refinery, approximately 90 kilometres south of Kuwait City, is one of the largest refineries built in one phase and has the capacity to process 615,000 barrels per day (bpd) of a wide slate of Kuwait domestic crude oils, including Kuwait export crude and Kuwait heavy crude.

The refinery is at the forefront of new technology adoption to comply with stringent environmental regulations to protect the local environment. It is configured to produce 225,000 bpd of low sulphur fuel oil (LSFO) to meet the Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) fuel demand for domestic power stations, significantly reducing SO_x emissions produced from the power stations by 75% from previous levels. The refinery also produces 340,000 bpd of the latest environmentally friendly ultra-low sulphur diesel fuel, jet fuel, kerosene and granulated sulphur for export to global markets and naphtha feedstock for local petrochemical plants.

Collaborating as ‘one Wood’

To address specific needs at critical stages of the project, we collaborated with our extended Wood team to draw upon the expertise of our global offices in providing:

• Direct support from our offices in Madrid, Paris, Milan, Chennai, Shanghai, and Seoul; locations local to the EPC contractor’s execution centres.
• Automation and control expertise in Houston to oversee EPC contractor’s factory acceptance test activities including hardware, software, and network testing associated with the process control and safety instrumented systems.
• Flow assurance and subsea pipeline expertise from our office in Staines to verify pipeline flow hydraulics and surge calculations.
• Construction, inspection, and completions experts from our office in Shanghai to support the project’s large-scale onshore modular execution strategy at a fabrication yard in Zhuhai, China, where more than 75,000 metric tons of modules were fabricated over 18 months.

To ensure all project stakeholders were aligned to completion, Wood’s proprietary Go Technology Hub2 was utilised as a common platform to manage all completions activities of the EPC contractors in module yards and at site. The fully synchronised and centralised data management hub provided a real-time solution to input, track and report completions progress, building from design stage through construction and completions into operations.