Petro Rabigh

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Aramco began looking hard at the future prospects of a 3,000-acre oil refinery, located in Rabigh, 165 kilometers north of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast. Originally, Aramco thought to simply upgrade the refinery, but then began to explore other possibilities. At its Rabigh refinery, founded in 1989, Aramco was sitting on an unusually abundant and stable supply of the feedstock that fueled the fast-growing petrochemical industry. To date, these materials had been converted into relatively low value petroleum-based products or, in the case of gases, simply burned off.