Bosicor Oil Pakistan Ltd, a private local firm, plans to build a 312 million dollars refinery in the country's south-west with a daily capacity of 180,000 barrels, the company said on Thursday.
Located about 45-kilometre (28 miles) west of Karachi on the coast of Balochistan, the refinery would initially have a capacity of 120,000 barrels per day (bpd), Bosicor said in a statement.
The project would be completed in two stages, with the first phase expected to be completed by 2009. "The first stage taking capacity to 145,000 bpd and the second stage taking the capacity to 180,000 bpd," it said. Bosicor already has a 30,000-bpd refinery in Balochistan.
The company estimated the cost of the project at 18.8 billion rupees, which includes 7.2 billion of equity, 3.5 billion rupees of suppliers' credits and 2.7 billion rupees of working capital. Bosicor has appointed Habib Bank Limited, the second-largest bank in Pakistan in terms of assets and deposits, as the lead underwriter.
Pakistan, almost totally dependent on oil imports, has an installed refining capacity of 12.82 million tonnes a year (just over 250,000 bpd) from its existing five refineries, but last year its refineries produced 11.33 million tonnes, official figures show. Pakistan consumes around 15 million tonnes of oil products annually.
The oil import bill for the 2005/06 fiscal year (July-June) exceeded 6.5 billion dollars, compared with 4.4 billion dollars in the previous fiscal year. Another oil plant, Indus Refinery, is being built in Karachi. It will have the capacity to process 4.2 million tonnes of crude oil a year (around 84,000 bpd), and will be completed by December 2007 at a cost of around 250 million dollars.
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