PTQ Q2 2025 Issue

Key profit drivers for sustainable crude-to-chemicals complexes

Case studies consider investment size, land availability, feedstock cost, and carbon neutrality requirements before reaching a project’s final investment decision

John Melancon, Parveen Kalia, Shankar Vaidyanathan, Ed Reyes and Michelle Barber Fluor Corporation

T he global energy transition is exerting significant technical and economic pressure on many industries, particularly the crude oil refining industry. Public perception views the refining industry as a major environ - mental concern, yet it remains economically vital for mod - ern society. It will face many regulatory challenges while demand for fuels and petrochemical products remains. The ways we produce, store, and use energy are changing. In some ways, the change is fast, and in other ways, it is slow. The demand for energy is growing, leading some to real - ise the energy transition may be better characterised as energy addition. There are different predictions on how this will affect the oil refining industry, but some conclusions are clear. First, the demand for oil is decelerating but continues to grow. It is expected to grow at or just below 1 MM bbl/ day this year and next. 1 Products produced from crude oil are shifting. According to the IEA, 30% of the oil demand growth by 2030 will be in the chemical sector. Figure 1 shows the typical prod - uct yield from crude oil in 2024. It shows that 75% of the product yield today is transportation fuels (gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel). Only about 9-10% are petrochemicals. It is expected that the petrochemical portion will grow every year while the fuels portions decrease. 2 Chemical yields Projects and operating facilities are increasingly shifting

from traditional transportation fuel products to higher petrochemical production. Figure 2 shows a global view of crude-to-chemical projects. These are all late-phase projects or currently operating facilities. Facilities with as high as 55% petrochemical yield exist today. The x-axis of Figure 1 shows that most of these projects are in the 15-20 MMTPA range (equivalent to 300-400 MBD), making it the proverbial ‘sweet spot’ for filling one or two world-scale mixed feed steam crackers while still producing a sizeable amount of transportation fuels. It is important to take advantage of the economies of scale when a facility reaches world-scale capacity to drive towards an economically feasible project. The y-axis, which is the crude wt% yield as petrochemicals, can be broken into three groups: • The first is the 20-30 wt% petrochemical yield group. • The second is the 40-45 wt% petrochemical yield group. • The third is the 50-55 plus wt% petrochemical yield group. In addition to the classification, it is important to note that refiners and licensors are collaborating on developing technologies targeting much higher chemical yields. These include technologies for processing crudes directly in steam crackers following pretreatment in feed preparation units. These groupings align with the type of crude feed, specif - ically how light or heavy it is. Projects utilising Arab Heavy or equivalent crude need to be in the 20-30 wt% yield

100%

20 15 10 25 30 35 40 50 45 55

Gasoline Diesel Jet fuel Heavy fuel Petrochemicals Others

80%

60%

40%

20%

2024

Renery capacity, MMTPA – 1MMTPA =~20 KBD

Figure 1 Typical crude oil product yields in wt% (2024)

Figure 2 Global view of crude-to-chemicals projects

PTQ Q2 2025