Contractors have submitted commercial bids for the diesel hydrotreater project at Qatar Petroleum’s (QP) Laffan Refinery in Qatar.

The bidding companies include US’s CB&I Lummus, South Korea’s GS E&C and Samsung Engineering,  Italy’s Saipem and Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas.

Sources at contractors say they have been unable to determine who submitted the most competitive bid, as QP has not been in communication with them.

“We have not heard back from them at all yet,” says a source.

Tecnicas Reunidas has undertaken the front-end engineering and design (feed) work for the project.

The hydrotreater will be complete by 2014 if the project progress as planned.

Operational since September 2009, the refinery in the Ras Laffan industrial city is Qatar’s first condensate refinery. The hydrotreater will convert the gasoil produced at the refinery into diesel.

The refinery sources condensate from Qatargas and RasGas fields. It produces 61,000 barrels a day (b/d) of naphtha, 52,00 b/d of jet fuel and 24,000 of gasoil, and 9,000 b/d of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

QP owns 51 per cent of the refinery. The US’s ExxonMobil, France’s Total, Japan’s Cosmo Oil and Idemitsu are the other big stakeholders, with a 10 per cent stake each.