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Foreign partners may get stake in first Vietnamese refinery
The state-run Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group (PetroVietnam) has proposed that foreign partners be allowed to purchase stakes in the country’s first oil refinery, Thanh Nien Daily has learnt.
“Some foreign companies have showed their interest in it (buying a stake),” said Nguyen Ngoc Su, deputy general director of PetroVietnam, the main investor in the Dung Quat Oil Refinery.
"Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has agreed in principle on the sale proposal and is allowing us to proceed," Chairman Dinh La Thang said after a conference in Hanoi Tuesday.
He told Thanh Nien Daily that Royal Dutch Shell, India’s Essar oil, and Russian oil firms Zarubezhneft and Rosneft are interested in purchasing stakes in the refinery that is being constructed in the central province of Quang Ngai.
According to the proposal, foreign partners can supply crude oil to the refinery or get involved in upgrading and expanding it, Su said, adding that they can hold up to 49 percent of the stake in the project.
Capitalized at US$2.5 billion, the country’s first oil refinery, with the capacity to refine 6.5 million tons of crude oil annually, is scheduled to commence operations in February 2009.
PetroVietnam has recently proposed that the government raise the refinery’s capacity to 10 million tons per year.
When fully operational, Dung Quat would supply more than 40 percent of the consumption in Vietnam, which has a population of 86.5 million people and more than 20 million motorbikes, according to Reuters.
Demand for refined oil products is expected to grow 13-15 percent annually by 2010.
Vietnam, while exporting crude oil, has to import all refined oil products for domestic use because it does not have an oil refinery yet.
The country spent $9.1 billion on importing 9.6 million tons of petroleum products in the first eight months of this year; a yearon-year increase of 94.3 percent in value and 13.7 percent in volume, according to the General Statistics Office.
Thanhnien
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