KUWAIT CITY (Trade Arabia)-- State refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) said it was considering contracting US firm Fluor Corporation again as part of a $15 billion refinery upgrade for which several foreign firms want to bid.

Chairman Farouk Al Zanki said KNPC had started prequalifying several firms for a tender to be split in several packages to upgrade its Mina Abdullah and Mina Al Ahmadi refineries, expected to be launched in August.
He said the tender might be worth as much as a four billion Kuwaiti dinars ($15 billion), comparable to the one to build the 615,000 bpd Al Zour refinery for which KNPC has contracted deals worth $8.4bn with four South Korean and one Japanese firm.
Earlier news reports suggested the new tender might even be worth 5 billion dinars.
Al Zanki said some of the same companies that bid for the Al Zour project, for which Fluor had been project manager, had also expressed interest in the new tender.
“Some of the companies are new, some are old,” he said.
He said KNPC was considering contracting Fluor again but had taken no decision yet.
KNPC plans to boost capacity of the two refineries to 800,000 bpd from 600,000 bpd by adding more units to Mina Abdullah, while Mina Abdullah would be mostly revamped, Al Zanki said.
The refinery upgrade, which is due to take effect after closure of the ageing Shuaiba refinery in 2011, is part of plans by the major Opec producer to raise refinery capacity to 1.415m bpd from 930,000 bpd.
The tender would be based on a cost-plus basis like the Al Zour project. Under such a system, companies typically submit detailed cost estimates for the refinery, plus their profit margin.