Iraq extends Karbala refinery bids to September

30 July 2013

The refinery is the first grassroot facility to be tendered in Iraq since the 1980s

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has extended the deadline for technical bids by one month for its planned $5bn new refinery at Karbala in the south of the country.

Engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) bids will now be submitted on 1 September, rather than the originally planned 4 August deadline, according to sources close to the project.

Six contractor groups have been prequalified to bid. Some firms have been qualified alone, while others have formed joint ventures and consortiums.

The tender was released in early-May. In June, State Company for Oil Projects (Scop), a subsidiary of the Oil Ministry announced that it had awarded a $71m project management consultancy (PMC) contract to France’s Technip. The company will carry out the evaluation of the tenders for the contracts, as well as the overall management of the construction phase. Technip carried out the refinery’s front-end engineering and design.

The 140,000 barrel-a-day (b/d) Karbala refinery is one of five new refineries proposed by the Oil Ministry, as part of its plan to increase the country’s refining capacity by more than 700,000 b/d by 2019. The plan envisages at least $50bn being spent over the next 10 years.

Progress has been slow, however. The Karbala refinery project is the first to move to the tendering stage, although it has seen delays of more than two years since designs were completed. Funds for the scheme have now been allocated in the 2013 federal budget.

The largest of these schemes is the 300,000 b/d Nassiriya refinery. The Oil Ministry plans to develop this facility as an integrated project along with the upstream development of the Nassiriya oil field. A licensing round is planned for mid-December where consortiums of EPC firms and international oil firms will bid for the joint development.

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