SAN FRANCISCO, November 18, 2015
Siluria Technologies, a leading innovator disrupting the petrochemical value chain with breakthrough process technologies, today announced another major strategic investment by a prominent international energy and industrial player. Siluria’s latest financing round was led by National Petrochemical Industrial Company (“NatPet”), a producer of propylene and polypropylene in Saudi Arabia and a subsidiary of the Saudi joint stock company Alujain Corporation. The multifaceted partnership adds to Siluria’s world-wide reach and expands a growing commercial portfolio in a massive target market.
Building on commercial deployments now under way, this financing puts the total equity capital raised since last year’s investment by energy-giant Saudi Aramco at over $50 million. NatPet from Saudi Arabia joins Fine-Teck from Oman, and Linde from Germany as Siluria’s most recent strategic investors. Since its inception, Siluria has raised approximately $150 million.
“We are very pleased to have NatPet join Siluria both as an investor and as a commercial partner,” said Siluria President and CEO, Ed Dineen, “The accelerating growth of our commercial portfolio is a clear validation of the strategic value of Siluria’s solutions in a highly volatile energy and chemicals market.”
“Our team was highly impressed with Siluria’s achievements and progress,” said Jamal Malaikah, the President and COO of NatPet, “We are keenly interested in working with Siluria on the commercialization of this technology in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.”
“The investment furthers Natpet’s diversification plans, and provides a window of opportunity across the world,” said Marwan Nusair, President of Alujain.
Siluria intends to continue to expand on this momentum. “We are managing strong interest in Siluria from additional strategic and financial investors,” said Jeff Wood, Siluria’s CFO. “The company is currently focused on commercial projects in the Refining and Midstream industries, and a pipeline of licensing projects in petrochemicals via its global partnership with Linde.”
About Siluria Technologies
Siluria Technologies is pioneering the commercial production of fuels and chemicals made from clean, abundant natural gas. Siluria’s proprietary technologies address the global petrochemical industry’s complex challenges of volatile commodity prices, shifting patterns of supply and demand, stricter environmental regulations, and the multi-billion dollar price tags associated with conventional petrochemical technology.
Siluria’s break-through Oxidative Coupling of Methane (“OCM”) process technology is believed to be the first commercially viable process to directly convert methane to ethylene. Siluria’s second process technology can convert ethylene to liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. This enables natural gas to potentially supplement petroleum as the worldwide basis for transportation fuels and commodity chemicals. Siluria’s revolutionary catalyst and process technologies uniquely combine nanomaterials, templating and chemical engineering, to convert natural gas into higher-value products using efficient processes that can be seamlessly integrated into existing industry infrastructure.
About NATPET
National Petrochemical Industrial Co. (NATPET) is a Saudi Arabian company producing Polypropylene (PP) resin since the year 2009. The plant is located in Yanbu Industrial City on the west coast of Saudi Arabia having a name-plate production capacity of 400,000 MT/Year. Natpet’s downstream manufacturing interests are comprised of a non-woven geotextiles venture in collaboration with Low& Bonar, and a compounding project under construction in association with A. Schulman Inc.