Tender for gas works repeated
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish state natural gas and pipeline concern Botas said yesterday it will hold another tender Monday for bids on engineering work for five natural gas grids to speed up construction. Botas wants to speed up the construction of storage facilities and to complete domestic natural gas networks to help eat up a possible supply glut in natural gas. Botas had unveiled bids in late July for the same five grids but did not decide on the winners. The tender will be repeated and winners will be chosen based on mutual negotiations on prices, Botas said in a statement. Botas has invited six firms that already participated in the first tender. They include the Netherlands’ Tebodin BV Consultants and Engineers, Britain’s Penspen Ltd and John Brown Hydrocarbon, US-based Universal Ensco, French firm Sofregaz and Germany’s ILF engineering group. The natural gas grids to be retendered include a $300 million natural gas pipeline between Turkey and Greece. In the first tender meeting, Sofregaz submitted the lowest bid at $5.2 million to conduct fundamental and detailed engineering work on the 285km (177-mile) pipeline to stretch from Karacabey near the Turkish city of Bursa to Komotini in Greece, Botas officials said at a tender meeting. Of the total pipeline, 200 kilometers will be laid in Turkey and the rest in Greece. The pipeline is due to pump 500 million cubic meters of natural gas to Greece from 2005, according to a memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries in late March. In another project announced at the first tender, Germany’s ILF submitted the lowest bid at $5.4 million to carry out engineering work on the Turkish section of the Shakh Deniz project in the Caspian Sea. The BP-led Shakh Deniz project, estimated to cost $3.2 billion, aims to link the giant Shakh Deniz natural gas fields in Azerbaijan to Turkey by 2005 through a pipeline in a bid to carry Caspian natural gas to European markets. Botas will also receive bids again to carry out engineering work for three local natural gas networks, it said.
