Beirut (APD) - The state-owned Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) on Wednesday called on the eleven companies that pre-qualified for bidding on its $6.3 billion Al-Zour refinery to collect their official invitations to bid, the Kuwait-based al Watan daily reported on Thursday.
The new refinery in southern Kuwait city will have a production capacity of 613,000 bpd and would be the largest refinery in the Middle East. It is scheduled to start operations in 2010.
As Kuwait allocated a total budget of $10 billion to the refining sector, KNPC, which also owns Kuwait's three existing refineries, would invest this amount into construction of the Al Zour refinery and into refurbishing the Mina Al-Ahmadi (MAA) and Mina Abdulla (MAB) refineries, Sami Al-Rushaid, KNPC's chairman and managing director, said in a press statement on KNPC's website.
Once the new refinery assumes production, the country's overall refining capacity would be boosted from 930,000 bpd at present to 1.4 million bpd.
KNPC assigned Fluor Corporation as the new refinery's project manager.
Fluor is a US-based international provider of engineering, procurement, construction, and maintenance services.
The bids for the new refinery project will be distributed on four major tenders.
Crude and other hydrocarbon processing units in the refinery will be divided into two tenders.
The third tender will be for the construction of utilities, and the fourth, for storage tanks and a pier.
The companies which KNPC pre-qualified as bidders earlier this month include Italy's Technip, Foster Wheeler Italiana, and the South Korean firms GS Engineering and Construction Corp, SK Engineering and Construction Co., Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co.
They also include Stone and Webster International from the U.S. and the UAE-based Petrofac International. [TS]
By Shikrallah Nakhoul, APD Staff Writer in Beirut
© APD (Arab Press Digest) 2006
