State-run Eastern Refinery Ltd has extended the deadline for submitting expressions of interest (EOIs) by 20 days until April 05, 2015 to appoint a project management consultant (PMC) to build its second refinery unit with 3.0 million tonne per year capacity, a top official said.
He said the ERL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of state-owned Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC), has extended the EOI submission deadline following request from some interested parties.
As per the original schedule, the EOI submission deadline was set to expire on March 15, the official said.
The BPC official said it has made a fresh attempt to expand the country's refining capacity in an attempt to cut reliance on refined product imports.
The ERL, operator of the country's sole 1.5 million tonne per-year Chittagong refinery, intends to construct the new refinery at the same premises of the existing refinery, he added.
The PMC will conduct a feasibility study on the refinery, decide on the plant's configuration and select an engineering, procurement and construction contractor, he said.
Bangladesh has been trying to expand its refining capacity for the past several years.
The country relies on imports to meet over 75 per cent of its demand for oil products.
The BPC has estimated that it needs to import 5.81 million metric tonnes of crude and refined oil products in 2015, up 7.6 per cent from 2014.
Its imports have been increasing steadily in recent years to meet rising demand, especially from oil-fired power plants.
This is the ERL's second attempt to expand refining capacity. In 2010, the company attempted to undertake an upgrade and expansion project to raise capacity of the Chittagong refinery to 4.5 million tonnes per year, but the project never took off due to financing issues.
It was eventually concluded that the Chittagong refinery, which was set up in the late 1960s, was too old to be upgraded.
Besides the latest effort, Kuwait in February said that it is planning to carry out a feasibility study on building a 10- million tonne per year refinery complex in Bangladesh.
The BPC and India's state-owned refiner Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), are also in talks with the latter supplying oil products via pipeline to Bangladesh from its 3.0 million tonne per year Numaligarh refinery in India's northeastern Assam state.
The two companies are currently assessing proposed pipeline routes.
mazizur.rahman@outlook.com
