Saudi Aramco extends $3bn Ras Tanura deadline

Contractors now have until February to submit bids for Eastern province refinery rehabilitation

Saudi Aramco has extended the bid deadline for its Ras Tanura Refinery Clean Fuels Project in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors now have until 2 February to formulate bids for the scheme, a six-week extension on the original date.  

This will affect the timeline for the scheme with a contract award now likley being made in May or June. The execution schedule is 36 months meaning the scheme will start commissioning in mid-2018.

MEED reported that Aramco had released the tenders for two packages in September and that 10 had been prequalified to bid for the work. The 10 contractors prequalified by Aramco are:

·         Daelim Industrial (South Korea)

·         Amec Foster Wheeler (UK)

·         GS Engineering & Construction (South Korea)

·         Hanwha Engineering & Construction (South Korea)

·         Hyundai Engineering & Construction (South Korea)

·         JGC Corporation (Japan)

·         Saipem (Italy)

·         Samsung Engineering (South Korea)

·         Tecnicas Reunidas (Spain)

·         Tecnimont (Italy)

The project will be split into two tenders now as per theMEED report of April 2014, which said the paraxylene package was being dropped to lower costs.

The two packages that will be released are:

·         Offsites and utilities

·         Naphtha and toluene

The naphtha and toluene package will be split into units with the following capacities:

·         Naphtha hydrotreater – 140,000 barrels a day (b/d)

·         Catalytic cracking reformer – 90,000 b/d

·         Isomerisation – 65,000 b/d

·         Toluene – 70,000 b/d

Prequalified contractors will visit the site on September 17-18 before a two-month bid formulation period.

The Ras Tanura refinery is fully owned by Aramco and is the largest oil facility in Saudi Arabia, with a capacity of 550,000 b/d. Aramco is currently upgrading its domestic refining capacity to lower the sulphur content of its downstream output and diversify the amount of refined products it manufactures.

Ras Tanura has also been earmarked as a potential site for additional petrochemicals production facilities, as part of the kingdom’s refining petrochemicals integration initiative, along with Jizan in the southwest of the kingdom and Yanbu on the Red Sea coast.