The state-owned Power Cell has extended further the bid-submission deadline by two weeks for receiving expressions of interest (EoI) from international companies to build an onshore LNG terminal at Matarbari on Moheshkhali Island in the Bay of Bengal to facilitate import of the fuel.
Interested firms or their consortium can now submit their EoIs by June 30 instead of the previously-set June 15, 2014 deadline.
Power Cell has extended the cut-off time for bid submission following request from the interested bidders, said a senior official.
He said a notice extending the deadline has been uploaded on the company website.
The liquefied natural gas from the planned terminal will be supplied to gas-fired power plants, said Mohammad Hossain, Director-General of the Power Cell.
The Power Cell, under the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, floated the tender in April for construction of the terminal on the island in the Bay of Bengal under a build, own and operate (BOO) basis.
As planned, the planned land-based LNG terminal would have the handling capacity of 3.5 million tonnes per year, equivalent to 500 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd).
The winner will take a majority stake in the venture, acting as engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor, and will be responsible for design and commissioning of the terminal encompassing receiving, offloading, storage and re-gasification facilities.
Other partners in the planned LNG terminal are the state-owned Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) and the International Finance Corporation's IFC InfraVentures fund.
Re-gasified LNG from the terminal would be sold on a long term, take-or-pay basis to a state-owned entity, which will have back-to-back gas-sale agreements with power-plant owners or operators and other customers.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh is eyeing an initial agreement to be inked with a US consortium comprising Astra Oil and Excelerate Energy soon for building the country's first LNG-import terminal, a senior Petrobangla official had said earlier.
The Astra Oil and Excelerate Energy consortium was selected to build the terminal in August 2012, but the US companies wanted to reach an agreement on maintenance fees before signing the final construction deal.
Petrobangla has now agreed to provide maintenance fees to keep the proposed LNG terminal operative until import starts, the official said.
The fees would cover the cost of maintaining a completed terminal in the event of any delay in the start of LNG import, the official said.
Bangladesh has extended a memorandum of understanding with Qatar for the import of 4.0 million tonnes of LNG per year, which expired in March 2013, until June 2015 and is confident of completing the floating terminal project by then.
However, it has not yet signed a final import agreement, which prompted the US consortium to seek maintenance fees.
The US consortium would pay US$2 million as bid bond and a penalty if it failed to provide the required services and provide a $20 million performance guarantee, the official said.
Petrobangla is planning a floating LNG terminal with a capacity to handle 5 million mt/year of LNG and a regasification capacity of at least 500,000 Mcf/d at the site.
It will have berthing and mooring facilities for LNG vessels with a capacity of 138,000-260,000 cubic meters.
