Three contractors vying for a major upgrade project at Abu Dhabi’s Ruwais refinery have submitted revised prices, according to sources familiar with the scheme.

South Korean groups GS Engineering & Construction and Samsung Engineering, and Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas all submitted revised commercial engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) bids in December 2016 on a project to upgrade Abu Dhabi’s Ruwais refining operations to handle additional offshore crude.

Project owner, state-owned Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (Takreer), asked companies to submit revised prices after receiving the initial commercial EPC bids on the project at the end of 2015. Takreer is thought to have requested new commercial EPC bids as it considered the prices of the initial bids to be too far over its budget for the scheme.

Takreer will now assess the revised bids and is expected to award the tender in the coming months.

When the project was initially tendered, the value of the EPC contract was estimated at about $3bn.

Takreer is planning to upgrade existing units at the Ruwais refinery site in the far west of Abu Dhabi. The work will include modifying existing units in order to process 420,000 barrels a day (b/d) of offshore crude.

The work will include upgrades on units completed in the Ruwais refinery expansion project, which was commissioned in 2015 and which doubled the existing capacity of the site to more than 800,000 b/d.