Fluor Corporation has reportedly won a front-end engineering design (FEED) contract for an aromatics plant belonging to Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC) in Sitra, Bahrain. GPIC is a joint venture equally owned by Bapco Energies, SABIC, and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.
The aromatics plant covered by this FEED contract will be a new addition to GPIC’s existing ammonia, urea, and methanol production complex, producing paraxylene (PX) and benzene, according to reports. The applied process technology has been described as “commercially-proven process technologies,” though the specific technology licensor has not been disclosed.
The planned production capacity is 1.2 million tonnes per year of paraxylene and 500,000 tonnes per year of benzene. The client is GPIC, Fluor is carrying out the FEED work, and the contract was reportedly announced in July 2026.
Bahrain has been moving to expand its petrochemical portfolio, traditionally centered on fertilizers and methanol, into the aromatics segment, and this project is viewed as part of a broader trend of downstream petrochemical diversification across the Gulf region.
Gulf national and joint-venture petrochemical companies have continued a trend of progressively adding higher-value downstream units such as aromatics to their existing production complexes, a pattern that is seen as a steady driver of demand for related FEED and EPC engineering services. Expanded aromatics supply is also expected to influence the raw material sourcing structure of downstream industries such as polyester and synthetic fibers.
Points to watch include the timing of the final investment decision (FID) following FEED completion and how the subsequent EPC contract will be structured, whether as a single award or split into multiple packages.