The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) has awarded Amec Foster Wheeler a front-end engineering design (FEED) contract to modernise the 6 Mt/year Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery (HAOR) in Baku, in Azerbaijan.
The scope of the contract includes the development of a number of facilities for diesel hydro-treatment, isomerisation, methyl tertiary-butyl ether, fluid catalytic cracking gasoline treatment, sour water stripper, amine treatment and sulphur recovery. Existing facilities will also be revamped, including those for crude and vacuum distillation, fluid catalytic cracking and continuous catalytic reforming.
The FEED is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2017, while the process of modernisation of the refinery is expected to be completed within several phases by early 2020.
In March 2016, SOCAR awarded KBR a project management consultancy (PMC) Contract for the modernisation project of the Heydar Aliyev Baku oil refinery. Under the contract, KBR will modernise the refinery to meet Euro 5 standards for all products and will increase the refinery capacity by 25% to 7.5 Mt/year; the catalytic cracking unit capacity will be increased from 2 to 2.5 Mt/year. The US$1bn modernisation project is expected to be completed by late 2018.