Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Al-Naimi today inaugurated the second phase of the Ssang-Yong Oil Company’s project for fractionation of heavy oil.   The Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) owns 35 percent of Ssang-Yong, one of the world’s most sophisticated and active refining companies, with great capability for producing light petroleum products.  The successful refining project is one of the fruits of the wise petroleum policy established by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz and Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz for expanding the Saudi oil industry to cover different parts of the world.    Similar successful joint ventures are in place in the USA, the Philippines, and Greece, and negotiations are under way for new joint ventures in China, Portugal, and India.

Korean Minister of Industry and Energy Chang Yol Lim, attending the inauguration, praised the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a credible, stable and secure exporter of oil, and a major element in the stabilization of the international oil market.   Also at the inauguration was Aramco Chairman Abdullah Juma’a, who stated that the refinery’s capacity now exceeds 500,000 barrels a day, up from 90,000 when Aramco, which now supplies the refinery with 90 percent of its requirements, first invested with the Ssang-Yong group. 

In 1996, Saudi Arabia exported to South Korea a total of 675,000 barrels a day of crude oil in addition to 28 million metric tons of natural gas and 1.6 million tons of other petroleum products.

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