The Sadara project in Jubail Industrial City II in Saudi Arabia, expected by its participants to become one of the largest and most complicated engineering projects in the world so far, will start up on time in 2015, as planned.

Up to now, 70% of the work on the complex has been completed, Arab News has reported.

Representing an investment of just under $20 billion, the joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemical will comprise 26 world-scale manufacturing plants.

The site's cracker will have capacity to produce of 1.5m t/y of ethylene and 400,000 t/y of propylene. Downstream units include commodity plastics plants producing LLDPE, polyurethane feedstocks MDI and TDI, along with polyether polyols.

Earlier, the jv partners said they expected the mammoth complex, billed as the first in the Middle East to use refinery liquids such as naphtha as feedstock, to be fully operational by 2016.