Major US engineering and construction group Fluor has been awarded a contract by MEGlobal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Equate Petrochemical, to build its new MEG manufacturing facility in Freeport, Texas, USA. The value of the contract was not revealed.

Jack Penley, senior vice president of construction & fabrication at Fluor, said this is the fifth major construction project that Fluor has won in Freeport during the past six years. The contract for mechanical construction will include the installation of equipment, steel and piping for the MEG process unit.

The plant, which will be MEGlobal’s first production facility in the US, is being built at Dow Chemical’s Oyster Creek site and start-up is planned for mid-2019. MEGlobal has a long-term agreement for the supply of ethylene feedstock with Dow, which completed construction of its new cracker at Freeport last March.

Fluor has also won a contract for the front end engineering design (FEED) from Egyptian state energy firm Enppi for the offsites and utilities section of the new Waphco phosphoric acid plant at Abu Tartour, New Valley province.

Working with Enppi as an integrated team, Fluor will fast-track the FEED phase of the project, which will use resources from the Abu Tartour mine to produce merchant-grade phosphoric acid. Once the facility is completed, it will produce 500,000 t/y of wet process phosphoric acid. A start-up date for the new plant was not disclosed.