Farida Khamis runs a $680 million Egyptian petrochemical arm

Farida Khamis runs a $680 million Egyptian petrochemical arm

On the Mediterranean edge of Port Said, where the Suez Canal hands ships off to Europe, a tangle of steel towers does something quietly improbable. It takes propane, heats it, strips away hydrogen and turns the gas into propylene, then spins that into small white pellets of polypropylene. The plant was the first in the world to run the process at commercial scale. The pellets it makes end up, often enough, woven into the carpets that carry the K…