RIL, Abu Dhabi cos tie up for $2billion UAE plant

Reliance Industries (RIL) along with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and ADQ will set up a $2-billion petrochemicals facility in UAE’s largest emirate, the companies said on Tuesday. While the parties didn’t reveal their equity component in the joint venture, this will be RIL’s first investment in a greenfield petchem project outside of India.
The petchem facility in Abu Dhabi’s Al Ruwais city, targeted to be operational by 2025, will produce chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Chlor-alkali enables the production of caustic soda, crucial to the alumina refining process. Ethylene dichloride is used to produce PVC, which has a wide range of applications across housing, infrastructure and consumer goods.
The Abu Dhabi facility will have a capacity to produce 9.4 lakh tons of chlor-alkali annually, 1.1 million tons of ethylene dichloride and 3.6 lakh tons of PVC. The petchem project was initiated based on the demand potential for these products. In 2019, RIL and Abu Dhabi had signed a framework to explore joint investments in petchem.