State-owned Oil Pipelines Company (OPC) has issued a tender for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of a new liquid petroleum gas (LPG) pipeline in the south of Iraq.

OPC, a subsidiary of the Oil Ministry, has set a deadline of 14 January for technical proposals. Tender documents are available for a fee of ID5m ($4,295) from the OPC headquarters in Daura, Baghdad. A deadline for commercial offers will be announced later.

The 16-inch pipeline will run from the Khor al-Zubair LPG storage complex in the southern Basra governorate to the Nassiriyah pumping station located in the Dhi-Qar governorate, with a total length of approximately 200-kilometres. It will replace an existing 14-inch LPG pipeline.

The LPG network is also struggling and failing to meet demands placed on it. There is a 14-inch pipeline linking Basra in the south and Kirkuk in the north, with LPG storage centers in place at Taji, north of Baghdad and at Hilla, Diwaniya and Nasiriyah in central Iraq. The line between Basra and Nasiriyah was reopened in 2004, but sabotage has regularly shut the pipeline since then.

According to the MEED Insight Iraq Oil & Gas 2012 Projects Market Report, the cost of replacing Iraq’s entire oil and gas pipeline network will come to at least $12bn. This figure does not include the rehabilitation or construction of new pumping stations and storage facilities.