CEO Nasser Al-Mahasher of S-Oil.

S-Oil decided to make daring investments in its oil refining, petrochemical and basic lube oil facilities under its strategy to ensure its dominance in those areas of the oil industry.

The strategy calls for the expansion of the heavy oil cracking facilities and production facilities for such high value-added petrochemical products as olefin, and propylene and other down stream products to be ready go online in 2017.

The oil refinery plans to expand its production of such high value-added products as propylene and olefin, the raw materials for resins, and light oil products like gasoline, kerosene and diesel, by cracking the low-cost bunker-C oil by investing around 5 trillion won, the largest investment by the company since 2011 when it built the largest paraxylene plant in the world at its Onsan Oil Refinery Complex in Korea.

Officials of the oil refinery said light oil like gasoline and petrochemical products like olefin and propylene will improve the company’s profitability.

S-Oil will also launch projects to improve the oil refining facilities at its Ulsan Complex to cut costs and boost effectiveness from this month for two years at an investment of around 200 billion won. The oil refinery wants to reduce the output of low value-added oil products to be replaced by high value-added products like low-sulfur diesel.

CEO Nasser Al-Mahasher went hiking with 220 employees, including officers, team leader-level managers and 42 new employees at Mt. Cheonggye in Seoul on Jan. 10, and expressed hopeful New Year’s resolutions. 

CEO Al-Mahasher, who climbed Peak Isu, exchanged well-wishing remarks with new employees. 

“This year, I ask all of you to pull the best of your resources and capabilities to successfully implement the RUC and ODC Project to build integrated refining-petrochemical facilities, which will become a key milestone in the history of S-OIL,” he said. “Although we are going through unprecedented difficulty, I trust that you will make 2015 the year when we turn crisis into opportunity and fully exert S-OIL’s spirit of enterprise to become braver when meeting more daunting challenges.” 

Since S-OIL began commercial operation of its first oil refinery — with a capacity of 90,000 barrels/day in 1980 — it has expanded facilities on two occasions, and today, S-OIL is a large oil refining company with a refining capacity of 669,000 barrels/day. In addition, keeping pace with such achievements, the company operates light oil desulfurizing facilities and gasoline manufacturing facilities.

S-OIL also operates a large-scale Bunker-C oil cracking center that is capable of converting petroleum products into light and low-sulfur products, in order to effectively cope with the changes in circumstances such as the increased demand for light oil in the domestic and overseas market and the strengthened environmental regulation.

The expansion of facilities and process improvements have been steadily continued. Today, S-OIL operates a naphtha refining plant with a daily capacity of 45,000 barrels and a BTX production plant with an annual capacity of 900,000 tons.

S-OIL also built a para-xylene production plant, the Xylene Center, with a capacity of 700,000 tons (currently 740,000 tons) per year, the world's largest, making a full-scale advancement to the petrochemical field.