Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC) celebrated its silver jubilee with the news that it had achieved a net profit of $90 million for 2004, up 37 per cent over the previous year.

Also heartening to the management and staff was the news that it had successfully completed its largest single shipment of urea to Australia, a total of 40,000 tonnes of the product transported on board the giant carrier MV Bunga Melor Empat.
The shipment was exported to one of the company’s customers in Australia from the GPIC urea-shipping terminal in the Sitra area of Bahrain.
“This is the biggest shipment ever to be exported to Australia since the company was awarded the AQIS certificate of the first degree from the Australian government,” said general manager Abdul Rahman Jawahery.
“The award was in recognition of the high quality of the GPIC systems and the safety of its export product.
“GPIC is the first urea producer to be awarded this distinguished status from the Australian government that gives its facilities for the unloading of shipments from their arrival in Australia.”
Jawahery said the Australian market was very important for urea manufacturers as it imported around 1.3 million tonnes annually, making it one of the world’s biggest importers. GPIC accounts for a 30 per cent share of all imports into Australia.
Jawahery took over recently from Dr Mustafa Al Sayed, who was appointed president of Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco).
GPIC’s owners are the Bahraini government, Petrochemicals Industries Company (PIC) of Kuwait and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic).
The first of GPIC’s plants were built for producing ammonia and methanol of capacity 1,000 tonnes per day. In 1989 the ammonia and methanol plants’ capacity was raised to 1,200 tonnes and in 1998 a urea granular plant was opened with a daily output of 1,700 tonnes.
GPIC was accredited with the ISO 9002 quality certificate for its manufacturing operations of ammonia and methanol while its urea production operations won a quality certificate in 1999, less than a year after the commissioning of the plant. The company was also declared the best operating company in the Arabian Gulf in 1996 for its high levels of production, safety, environmental standards and quality assurance.
The urea plant design fully complies with the strictest environmental laws, the company having selected the latest urea granule manufacturing technology on sealant layers in preference to the granulation tower technology, despite the higher cost. With the technology it adopted it was able to reduce urea dust from the urea granule-manufacturing unit.
The company achieved the environment management standard ISO14001 in late 1999 for all its operations.
It also won the Chemical Industry Safety Trophy 2003 from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) in the UK. The trophy is considered to be one of the highest international awards that chemical industries companies can receive in occupational safety and health.