Fujairah’s growing energy industry will expand into biofuels with an $800 million plant announced yesterday.
Petrixo Oil & Gas, a Dubai-based company, has finished the engineering for a biofuels refinery in the coastal emirate, according to a release on the state news site WAM yesterday.
The plant would be capable of producing one million metric tonnes per year of bio-diesel, bio-jet fuel and other products in a 460,000 square metre site near the emirate’s free zone.
No feedstock or timeline for construction was specified, but the release said Petrixo had gotten backing for the project from “consortium of Major International companies and financial institutions.”
Petrixo would join Microsol, a solar wafer producer with a factory in the Fujairah free zone, in setting up an alternative energy business in the emirate.
Once a hub for small-time fishermen, bunkering fuel and container shipping, Fujairah is transforming into a industrial hydrocarbons hub, spurred by a crude pipeline designed to allow all of Abu Dhabi’s onshore oil exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. A refinery, gas import terminal and crude storage tanks are among the projects set to be built there.
ayee@thenational.ae
