Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (Takreer) has pushed back the deadline for the first round of bidding on an estimated $500m deal to build a lubricant refinery at Ruwais after bidders asked for more time.

Firms bidding on the deal will now submit technical proposals to Takreer on 29 March, two weeks after the previous 15 March deadline. This cut-off date was in turn postponed from the original 24 February deadline (MEED 24:2:10).

Executives working on bids for the deal say that they asked for more time to prepare their proposals because of the large volume of tenders they are bidding on in the emirate.

“We have a lot of things to put in at the moment, so we needed more time just to get this right,” says the business development manager of one firm looking at the deal.

The winner of the engineering, procurement and construction deal will build a 300,000-barrel-a-day base oil refinery. Base oils are heavy grades of oil commonly used as industrial lubricants. Takreer currently blends the base oils into fuel oil and then sells this on the open market.

The prequalified contractors include:

• SK Engineering & Construction (South Korea)
• Hyundai Heavy Industries (South Korea)
• Samsung Engineering (South Korea)
• Hanwha Corporation (South Korea)
• Technip (France)
• China Technical Consultants (Taiwan)
• Toyo (Japan)
• Uhde (Germany)
• Petrofac (UK)

Takreer has set a tentative 19 April deadline for commercial bids on the deal, but contractors believe this will now be pushed back until May at the earliest.