PAVLODAR – Kazakh businesses will make significant contributions to the modernisation of the Pavlodar Petrochemical Plant, said Gavit Kurkimov, deputy general director of Rominserv SRL, the project’s general contractor.
In July 2013, the Pavlodar Petrochemical Plant and Rominserv signed a contract worth $1.072 billion for the design, supplies and implementation of the project. Earthworks will begin at the refinery as early as April. After the upgrade, Kazakhstan will have a fundamentally new breed of factory. General director of the enterprise Shukhrat Danbai said that in addition to an increased processing capacity of up to 7 million tonnes of hydrocarbons per year, the entity will be able to process 5.5 million tonnes of domestically produced oil (originally the plant was designed to handle West Siberian oil). An equally important modernisation goal is transitioning to producing all types of motor and diesel fuel at Euro-4 and Euro-5 standards. Today, the Pavlodar plant manufactures fuel that meets the requirements of Euro-2. Among other things, the enterprise seeks to increase the depth of oil processing from 85 to 90 percent.
Recently, a meeting on local content development during the modernisation of the plant was held in Pavlodar and was attended by Kazakh producers of technological equipment, representatives of the large industrial enterprises Kazenergocable, Petropavlovsk Heavy Engineering Plant, Belkamit Engineering Plant LLP, Pavlodar Energo Stroy and others. Officials from the Kazakhstan Ministry of Oil and Gas, Ministry of Industry and New Technologies, KazMunayGas Processing and Marketing, the Pavlodar regional administration, the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs, the Union of Service Companies and the Union of Engineering Companies of Kazakhstan also attended the meeting. The main objective of this interactive platform was to explain to potential suppliers of goods and services the main algorithm of procurement and criteria for the selection of participants.
“The modernisation of Kazakhstan’s refineries will allow them to satisfy 100 percent of domestic fuel demand and improve product quality. Rominserv SRL has set a goal to involve Kazakhstan suppliers and manufacturers in the modernisation project. For this purpose, the company created a new department called the Kazakh Content Service to monitor and analyse the local goods and services market,” Kurkimov said.
Progress has already been made in this area. In December 2013, the company signed its first industrial order, which was $3.18 million with the Kazakh company Belkamit for three columns weighing 423 tonnes. It’s worth noting that earlier, products of such complexity in technology projects were imported from Russia and other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries.
The range of products and services that can be purchased from local companies is quite wide. Dauren Akhmetov, KazMunayGas Processing and Marketing’s general manager of the innovation and local content department listed containers, tanks, separators, fireproof paints, metallic structures, pales, soil, concrete, gravel and other products as ones now produced in Kazakhstan that were previously imported from the country’s CIS partners. Local skilled workers will be recruited to work on upgrading the Pavlodar Petrochemical Plant.
“We are not going to procure a large staff from abroad during the main stage of the project, but it is necessary to bear in mind that the modernisation of the petrochemical industry is a very serious task. All equipment that will be delivered here must be approved by major licensors, so it is quite understandable that some specialists will be invited from overseas. But most workers and managers will be local hires,” Kurkimov said.
Rominserv is a member of the Rompetrol Group (a 100 percent subsidiary of KazMunayGas). In Kazakhstan, they have already implemented a number of projects, including the reconstruction and modernisation of the Atyrau refinery and the technical supervision of construction of a road bitumen plant at the Aktau Plastics Plant.
