The expansion to the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) refinery will boost revenues by $1bn.

“The refinery will move close to 400,000 barrels capacity, it will increase our revenues by about $1bn just by refining margins alone,” said Oil Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Khalifa al-Khalifa at the Gateway Gulf investor forum in Manama on 9 May.

Bapco signed a $4.2bn contract with a consortium of foreign engineering contractors for its modernisation and refinery expansion project earlier this year.

The consortium is led by France’s Technip FMC, and includes Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas and South Korea’s Samsung Engineering.

Once complete, he refining capacity is expected to reach 400,000 barrels a day (b/d), from the current 267,000 b/d output.

Bahrain is setting up a $1bn fund to allow investors to participate in oil and gas projects in the kingdom.

Bahrain’s oil and gas sector is attracting strong interest following the announcement on 1 April that it had made its largest oil discovery since 1932. The announcement of the Khalij al-Bahrain discovery marks the start of a new chapter for the oil industry in Bahrain, which was the first member of the GCC to discover oil 86 years ago.