Paradip: Maire Tecnimont S.p.A. Monday announced that a consortium composed of its subsidiaries Tecnimont S.p.A. and Mumbai- based Tecnimont Private Limited has been awarded an EPCC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Commissioning) Lump Sum contract worth 450 million USD by Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) for the implementation of a new Para-Xylene (PX) plant and the relevant offsites facilities. The plant will be located in Paradip, in the State of Odisha, in Eastern India.

The overall value of the contract is about USD 450 million. The scope of work entails Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Commissioning activities up to the Performance Guarantees Test Run. Once completed, the new PX plant will have a capacity of 800,000 tonnes per year. The time schedule is 33 months for mechanical completion from the award date. 

The PX produced will be used to feed the adjacent PTA (Purified Terephthalic Acid) unit, thus ensuring availability of world-class feedstock that will provide a significant boost to the country’s manufacturing industry.

PX is an intermediate building block for the petrochemical value chain, necessary for the synthesis of several  polymers, particularly PET (polyethylene terephthalate, also known as polyester) which is used in numerous industrial applications in every day-life in the packaging, cosmetic, pharmaceutical industries to mention some.

Pierroberto Folgiero, Maire Tecnimont Group chief  executive officer, commented: “We are really glad that our relationship with a prominent player such as IOCL keeps on growing steadily with another strategic contract to boost the Country’s natural resources transformation capacity with the best available technologies, thus ensuring environmentally best performing products and processes. As India is paving the way for a large wave of investments in the downstream segment to meet the fast-growing domestic demand for plastic products and intermediates, we are best positioned to seize new upcoming opportunities, thanks to our technological mindset as well as our historical local presence through our Indian engineering hub Tecnimont Private Limited”.