South Korean group wins $865m UAE refinery contract

02 July 2017

Work on fire-damaged gasoline-producing unit expected to take at least 18 months

South Korea’s GS Engineering & Construction (E&C) has been awarded a $1 trillion won ($865m) contract to repair a plant at the Ruwais oil refinery in Abu Dhabi, which was damaged by a fire in January.

GS E&C said the work would be finished in early 2019, leaving the damaged facilities offline for at least another 18 months, according to a company statement reported by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

MEED reported in May that the contract was likely to be awarded to GS E&C, as the damaged residual fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC) unit was built by the South Korean group as part of an expansion project to double the capacity of the refinery, which was completed in 2015.

Ruwais, which is operated by state-owned Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (Takreer), is the largest refinery in the UAE. The expansion project doubled the facility’s capacity to about 800,000 barrels a day (b/d).

In February, Takreer’s parent group Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) put out a tender to buy more than 240,000 tonnes of gasoline for March and April due to a supply shortfall caused by the fire damage. This was reportedly followed by a tender to buy 316,000 tonnes of gasoline over May and June, and the oil producer is now looking to meet the supply gap to the end of 2017.

Takreer is also in discussions with bidders over a major project to upgrade the Ruwais refinery to process crude from Abu Dhabi’s offshore oil fields. South Korean groups GS E&C and Samsung Engineering, and Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas all submitted revised prices for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) tender in December 2016.

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