Sadara, claimed to be the world’s largest chemical complex ever built in a single phase, has started up its first production unit, an LLDPE plant using Dow Chemical’s technology. The complex is a joint venture of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) and Dow.

The 750,000 t/y unit, one of 26 production facilities to be built at the $20 billion complex in Jubail Industrial City II, is the first PE plant in the Middle East to use Dow’s Solution process. Its output will supply producers of specialties such as food grade plastics, industrial and consumer packaging and health and hygiene films.

Sadara’s site will also be the first in the Middle East to use refinery liquids such as naphtha as feedstock. Production units for LDPE and polyurethane precursors MDI, TDI and polyether polyols will be positioned downstream of the cracker with capacity for 1.5 million t/y of ethylene and 400,000 t/y of propylene.

The complex’s adjacent PlasChem Park, backed by Sadara and Saudi Arabia’s Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu and managed by Munich-based German chemical park management firm Chemie-Cluster Bayern, is wooing small- and medium-sized plastics converters and other users of standard thermoplastics to invest in the park.