Two foreign tenders dropped for appointment of Consultant for SPM operation

CHATTOGRAM, July 8: Two foreign tenders have been dropped for appointment of a Consultant for the Single Point Mooring (SPM) operation with double pipeline on Tuesday, the last date for submission of tender.

"One of them belongs to Indonesia and another is Netherland firm," said Engineer Aminul Ahsan, Chairman of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC).

 "The evaluation of technical offers will begin soon while the evaluation of financial offer will be held later on," he said.

BPC has invited international tenders to appoint a consultant for the SPM project. The tender is for the operation and maintenance (O&M) of the SPM system, with a contract duration of 40 months.

The tender is an international competitive bidding process. BPC is seeking a consultant to oversee the O&M of the SPM, which is a crucial piece of infrastructure for Bangladesh's oil and gas sector. The selected consultant will be responsible for ensuring the efficient and safe operation of the SPM, which includes the mooring and transfer of crude oil and petroleum products.

On April 30, the state-run agency floated an international tender to appoint a contractor for the system's operation and maintenance (O&M), over 14 months after commissioning the dual-channel crude oil terminal in March 2024.

Later on the BPC extended the deadline for submission of tender to July 8 from June 19. The appointment of a contractor will be completed in the end of the current year. As a result, the operation of the project is expected to begin in the next year.

The operations of the Single Point Mooring (SPM) have been delayed to one year due to a decision of the government for appointment of operations and maintenance (O&M) contractor through Open Tender Method (OTM) instead of G2G basis.

The SPM, built on 90 acres of land in Maheshkhali upazila, Cox's Bazar, is a government-to-government (G2G) initiative between Bangladesh and China, completed at a cost of Tk8,341 crore in the last year. The test commissioning of the project had also been completed in the past year. But due to new process of the appointment, the operation of SPM has now been delayed over one year.