Qatar to revive US$2bn Tunisia refinery

Qatar’s government said it has revived a plan to build Tunisia’s second refinery and may need a partner for the US$2bn project. “The costs of the project are very high, and it may require another partner,” Khalid Al-Attiyah, Qatar’s minister for international cooperation, told reporters in the Tunisian capital yesterday. He did not elaborate. In 2007, Qatar Petroleum won a bid to build the refinery at Skhira as part of a joint venture with London-based Petrofac, a project that was later shelved. After last year’s uprising that ousted Tunisia’s longtime president, the new government agreed to revive the refinery, which would have an initial capacity of 120,000 bpd, eventually rising to 250,000 barrels. Tunisia’s only refinery has a capacity of 34,000 bpb. Tunisian Minister of Industry Mohammed Amine Alchakara said this month that the project is expected to go ahead with production starting in 2014 or 2015, the official TAP news agency reported.