Iran says it is negotiation with China over a project to revamp its oldest and biggest refinery at a total cost of $3 billion.
Managing Director of the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) Abbas Kazemi was quoted by the domestic media as saying that the Chinese contractor in the project would be Sinopec.
Kazemi added that a contract with Sinopec over the project could be signed within the next month.
The objectives of the project, added the official, will be improving the quality of gasoline producer at Abadan refinery, reducing pollutants, and boosting the efficiency rate of producing gasoline and other products.
Kazemi emphasized that these would be carried out as Phase One of revamping Abaran refinery – which was the world’s biggest in the 70s when it processed 628,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil.
“Last week, China officially opened the financing for the plan to fix and improve the quality of the Abadan refinery,” the media quoted Kazemi as saying.
The deal is expected to be signed when a delegation of Chinese oil officials visit Tehran next month, Kazemi added.
The current processing capacity of Abadan refinery is 400,000 bpd. Almost half of the processing is being carried out in three 70-year-old units that are dilapidated, Iran’s Shana news agency reported. These are to be replaced with a new unit with a capacity of processing 210,000 bpd.
Iran has already installed a processing unit with a capacity of 150,000 bpd in Abadan refinery and the new unit would thus increase the collective refining capacity of the whole facility to as high as 360,000 bpd.