Australia’s WorleyParsons has submitted the lowest bid on a tender to manage the expansion of the Bahrain refinery in Sitra, south of Manama.

Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) received three bids for the project management consultancy (PMC) contract to oversee the construction of the scheme.

• WorleyParsons submitted a bid of $165.3m,
• ahead of US-based KBR with a proposal worth $175m,
• UK-based Amec Foster Wheeler posted the third lowest bid at $187.3m

Bapco’s modernisation programme aims to rehabilitate the refinery as well as increase capacity from 267,000 barrels a day (b/d) to 360,000 b/d.

Budget: The budget for the scheme could be as high as $9bn.

The proposed packages are likely to be:

• Offsites and utilities
• Crude unit and associated facilities
• Hydrocracker and associated units
• Residue conversion
• Hydrogen plant
• Kerosene Merox unit

Bapco is expected to invite companies to bid on the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) packages in the first half of 2016.

About 220,000 b/d of oil is currently provided by Saudi state oil company Saudi Aramco, with 40,000 b/d coming from Bahrain’s own reserves. The exact increase in capacity that the refinery’s rehabilitation and expansion will provide has not been released. Industry sources told MEED in June that the figure should be about 100,000 b/d.

The vast majority of the additional capacity will be middle distillates or diesel fuel.

In October last year, Bapco awarded a $100-plus contract to US-based Chevron Lummus Global to carry out design and engineering work on Sitra refinery.

The company, a joint venture between the US’ CB&I Lummus and Chevron, will also license its technologies for residue hydrocracking and vacuum gasoil hydrocracking units as part of the refinery’s modernisation programme.

The prior month, Bapco awarded France’s Technip a $55m front-end engineering and design (feed) contract for the refinery’s residue conversion unit (RCU).