Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (Takreer) has pushed back the deadline for a final round of bidding on the deal to build a new lubricants plant at its Ruwais refining complex by nearly two weeks.

Contractors have been asked to hand in cost proposals for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract by 16 May, rather than the 3 May deadline they were previously given. This in turn was an extension from the original 19 April cut-off for prices.

The technical bidding stage suffered similar delays, with Takreer pushing the deadline back to 29 March from 15 March (MEED 29:3:10).

The latest delay came after a prolonged period of talks over the details of the technical proposals made by the bidding firms, which only ended on 22 April, sources close to the deal tell MEED.

The winning bidder will build a 300,000-barrel a day base oil refinery at Ruwais. 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.

Firms that submitted proposals in the first round of bidding include:

• Samsung Engineering (South Korea)
• Hanwha Corporation (South Korea)
• Technip (France)
• China Technical Consultants (Taiwan)
• Toyo (Japan)
• Uhde (Germany)