Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) has cancelled the tender for a $150m contract to build a new oil and gas storage tank farm in Sharjah.

Engineering executives at firms which bid for the deal and sources close to Adnoc for Distribution (Adnoc-Fod), the fuel storage subsidiary of the state energy giant, say that Adnoc cancelled the tender in the second week of January.

Five international engineering firms bid for the deal in September 2009 and they had expected Adnoc to award the deal before the end of the year. In October, business development executives said Lebanon’s Contracting & Trading and the local Al-Jaber Energy were the frontrunners to win the deal (MEED 30:11:2009).

However, a series of issues with the tender led to the deal being cancelled, says one source close to the company. In particular, Adnoc wants to complete more detailed engineering design work on the deal to avoid any confusion related to scope and cost.

A retender is planned, but not likely to happen before April or May, the source says. “It will be three to four months before they are ready to retender the deal, and if you add on another two months for the tender it will be six months from now at the earliest before we see an award,” he says.

The successful bidder will build nine tanks with 83,000 cubic metres of storage capacity for refined oil and gas products including jet fuel, diesel, gasoline and fuel oil at the Hamriyah free zone on the Sharjan coast.