CHATTOGRAM, July 4: State-owned Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) has extended the last date for submission of the request for expression of Interest (EOI) for appointment of a Consultant for the second unit of the Eastern Refinery limited (ERL-2) to July 20.
According to a BPC notification, the last date for submission of the EOI for selection of an international consulting firm for rendering consultancy services as Project Management Consultant (PMC) for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) works of the ‘Modernisation and Expansion of ERL project. Earlier the last date for the submission of EOI was July 6.
Government has made progress in fast-tracking the long-delayed ERL Unit-2 project.
BPC authorities hoped that the Consultant might be appointed by the current calendar year.
Previously, the government had taken up a plan to set up a second unit of the ERL in 2010, and then it approved Tk13,000 crore in 2013. But so far there has been no progress. In 2022, BPC moved to proceed with its own funds, raising the estimate to Tk23,000 crore. But the work did not start.
In 2024, S Alam Group offered to construct ERL-2 for Tk25,000 crore, approved on July 9. The project was suspended in August after the mass uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government.
Past interim government revived the plan at an estimated project cost of Tk 36,410 crore. But after failing to secure foreign loans, it revised the project relying on state funds and BPC resources. The original estimate had been made at Tk42,974 crore.After construction, the ERL-2 unit will produce Euro-5 gasoline and diesel and upgrade the existing refinery’s diesel, motor spirit, and octane to Euro-5 standards.
BPC has completed a new ‘Installation of Single Point Mooring (SPM) with Double Pipeline’ project, enabling transport of up to 4.5 million tonnes of crude oil annually.
The ERL-2 could produce 400,000 tonnes of furnace oil, 60,000 tonnes of LPG, 600,000 tonnes of Euro-5 gasoline, 1.1 million tonnes of Euro-5 diesel, 200,000 tonnes of lube base oil, and 500,000 tonnes of jet fuel annually. Following Interim government’s efforts to reduce project costs, the construction cost of ERL-2 has been cut by Tk4,465 crore, before the work start.
The authorities revised a proposal, putting the project’s new cost at Tk31,000 crore, down from Tk35,465 crore, and has been submitted to the Planning Commission. On December 23 in 2025 last, the ECNEC approved the project.
ECNEC had asked to revise detailed engineering, design, construction supervision, commissioning, and associated buildings and infrastructure to ensure costs were reasonable.
According to BPC, Bangladesh currently has a demand of about 7.2 million tonnes of fuel oil per year. Of the supplied fuel, ERL refines 1.5 million tonnes of crude oil annually, supplying roughly 20 per cent of the nation’s total fuel demand.
About 1.5 million tonnes of crude are imported from Middle Eastern countries and refined at ERL, which produces 16 types of petroleum products including LPG, petrol, octane, kerosene, diesel and furnace oil. In addition, the country imports around 4.5 million tonnes of refined fuel annually from India and China.
ERL, country’s only state-owned refinery located in Chattogram, set up in 1968, has an annual capacity of 15 lakh tonnes and is primarily configured to process Middle Eastern crude.
