The shortlist of international contractors looking to bid for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts for the $1bn expansion at the Saudi Aramco Lubricating Oil Refining Company (Luberef) complex is down to seven.

The project, which will be executed at the Luberef complex at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, has a deadline of 30 June for EPC contracts, but now all the prequalified bidders will be participating.   

The remaining bidders on the project are:

• Chiyoda (Japan)
• Daelim Industrial (South Korea)
• GS Engineering & Construction (South Korea)
• Hyundai Engineering & Construction (South Korea)
• Saipem (Italy)
• Samsung Engineering (South Korea)
• Tecnicas Reunidas (Spain)

The companies who now will not be participating include:

• SK Engineering & Construction (South Korea)
• Techint (Italy)
• Technip (France)
• Tecnimont (Italy)
• SNC Lavalin (Canada)

“There is a lot of project activity in the kingdom at the moment, so maybe it is a case of contractors choosing the respective contracts they want to work on,” says a contracting source based in Saudi Arabia.

The project is being tendered in as one lump-sum turnkey (LSTK) contract, which will be a combination of grassroots construction and brownfield rehabilitation. The exact scope was previously unknown, but documents seen by MEED indicate that it will involve the construction of a 23,000 barrel-a-day (b/d) lube hydrocracker and catalytic ISO-dewaxing complex, which will include hydrogen manufacturing, sour gas absorption, sulphur recovery and prilling units.  

Luberef also plans to Increasing the vacuum distillation unit (VDU) capacity to 40,000 b/d from 26,000 b/d and increasing the propane deasphalting from 6,500 b/d to 12,500 b/d as well as increase the asphalt capacity to 12,000 b/d.  

Other upgrades will include modifying existing pipework and building a new cooling water system complete with cooling towers.

Luberef is a 70:30 joint venture of Saudi Aramco and the local Jadwa Investment.