Foreign investors in Vietnam's third oil refinery aim to begin construction next month, an official said Tuesday.
Britain's Technostar Management Ltd and Russia's Telloil have agreed to start building the Vung Ro facility in June, Nguyen Minh Hoa, an official with the planning and investment department in Phu Yen province, told AFP.
It will be the country's first refinery to be fully foreign-invested.
Hoa said the developers planned for the refinery's capacity to be six million tonnes annually, rather than the four million initially planned. This will raise their investment from 1.7 billion dollars to nearly three billion dollars, he said.
Construction of the refinery in central Vietnam is expected to last three years.
Early last year the country's first refinery opened at Dung Quat, also in the central region, with a capacity of 6.5 million tonnes a year or 148,000 barrels per day.
Until Dung Quat began operations, fast-developing Vietnam imported all of the refined petroleum products it needed for domestic use.
Dung Quat was financed by state-owned PetroVietnam Group.
Two years ago officials held a ground-breaking ceremony in the northern province of Thanh Hoa for the nation's second refinery, a joint venture between PetroVietnam and companies from Kuwait and Japan.
The Nghi Son refinery, with a capacity of up to 10 million tonnes a year, was to be operational by 2013.
Vietnam boasts rich offshore oil reserves located in the South China Sea, where PetroVietnam is exploiting several major fields together with Russian and other foreign partners.
Source: AFP