Site

The complex is situated in Antwerp's port area in the thriving Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam (ARA) hub serving Europe's oil markets. The site comprises Europe's third-largest refinery with a capacity of 338,000 barrels of oil per day, a petrochemical complex and a polymer plant that produces high-density polyethylene. The Antwerp complex manages two pipelines, one for ethylene and the other for propylene, allowing the Company to transport 6 million tons of products every year to its Feluy polymer plant, which is also located in Belgium.

To keep pace with the latest changes in the European market, we decided in 2013 to invest more than €1 billion to upgrade the Antwerp complex. Our objectives were to respond to market demand by supplying more light products that meet the strictest environmental standards, make the complex more flexible so that it can use the most cost-advantaged feedstocks available and increase synergies between refining and petrochemicals.

Inaugurated in November 2017, the upgrade consisted of three projects:

• OPTARA (OPTimization of the Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam area) Project, where the aim was to transform more heavy fuel oil into light products that meet the new EU specifications;
• ROG (Refinery Off-Gas) Project, which involved building a unit to recover the gas co-produced by the refinery ("by-product gas") and transform it into a feedstock for petrochemicals to replace more expensive naphtha;
• Ethane Project, which consisted in revamping one of the complex's two steam crackers and adapting the site's logistics so that it can import 200,000 tons of ethane per year from Norway by ship.