Qatar Petroleum issued an invitation to the seven pre-qualified companies in June 2009 to bid for the project. It may be recalled that US-based Bechtel, GS Engineering & Construction and Hyundai Engineering & Construction Company of South Korea, Japan’s JGC, SK Engineering & Construction of South Korea, Snamprogetti of Italy and French company Technip were pre-qualified for the main plant package.
The Al Shaheen refinery project was thereafter under review in March 2009, reportedly owing to high capital costs that were pegged at $13 billion, lower oil prices and falling demand. Recent reports suggest that the project may now make headway as the costs have been scaled down to below the $10 billion mark. Company sources, however, declined to reveal their estimates.
The Al Shaheen refinery, to be located in Mesaieed Industrial City of Qatar, envisages the construction of a grassroots refinery with a nominal capacity of 250,000 barrels per day of crude oil.
The facilities to be installed include distillate hydrotreaters, hydrocrackers and fluid catalytic cracking units (FCCU), summarization units, naphtha hydrotreaters and splitters, twin catalytic reformers and vacuum distillation units. The refinery will produce high quality products such as gasoline, diesel oil, jet fuel, distillates, bitumen and green coke.
The refinery will process crude oil from the Al Shaheen field operated by Maersk Oil Qatar and situated about 180km north of Doha. The project includes the construction of a 90 km offshore and 110 km onshore pipeline to transport crude from the Al Shaheen fields to the refinery site.
The refinery, which was originally slated for commissioning in early 2012, is expected to be completed by 2014.
The preliminary engineering and design study has been complete. French company, Axens was selected in April 2008 for the process technology contract including basic engineering and design for the 51,000 b/d desulphurization unit, 60,000 b/d catalytic cracker and 30,000 b/d gas unit.
Technip executed the $60m front-end engineering design (FEED) contract, which was completed in third quarter of 2008. Jacobs Engineering of the US, and Beicip of France jointly undertook the pre-FEED work.
