OREANDA-NEWS. June 24, 2011. Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Co., Ltd and KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR) signed an agreement to create a joint venture company in the People’s Republic of China. The purpose of the Joint-Venture will be to market, sell, deliver and support Veba Combi Cracker (VCC) technology, under KBR’s collaboration agreement for the technology with BP (NYSE:BP).

 VCC technology is a hydrogen addition technology suitable for processing refinery residuum, coal tar and coal oil mixtures into high-quality distillates or synthetic crude oil in the refining, upstream field upgrading and coal-to-liquids (CTL).

 "The option to convert unconventional feedstocks such as heavy oil, coal-tar and coal-oil mixtures will be key in meeting China’s transport fuel demand for the next 25 years," said Mr. Liu Chunquan President of BPEC. "VCC is a highly competitive process for maximising transport fuel yield from heavy oil and coal. We are very pleased to be collaborating with KBR on the use of VCC in China to maximize liquid fuel yields, whilst minimising environmental impacts of heavy and unconventional feedstocks."

 The Yanchang Petroleum Group is one of the four qualified enterprises granted rights for oil and gas exploration in China. The Yanchang Group has rich resources of coal and coal tar with current coal tar production of 3 million tons / year which will exceed 6 million tons / year within 5 years. The Yanchang Group’s refining and processing capacity exceeds 15,000,000 tons / year producing gasoline, diesel and about 3 million tons/year of heavy oil (residue).

 BPEC is a 51% owned subsidiary of the Yanchang Petroleum Group and has a class A engineering design, engineering consulting license for chemical and petrochemical industry as well as the EPC General Contractor, Project Management Consulting (PMC) certificate issued by the Chinese central government.