Dr. Abdul Hussain bin Ali Mirza, Minister of Energy, who opened the PETROTEC Bahrain 2012, said Bahrain was looking at its refining capacity beyond 2012.
“The refinery expansion will give us a competitive advantage and better position us to capture the opportunities that future market environments may offer. This initiative has been named as the Refinery Master Plan Project. The current refinery, parts of which are 75 years old, evolved over the years and new units have been added, the last two being the hydrocracker and the lube base oil plants in 2007 and 2010 respectively. The decision was made to further upgrade the refinery. The investment, depending on final capacity and configuration is currently estimated to be in the range of $8 billion. The new upgraded refinery will be able to meet the quality of the products demanded by the markets of the future, will meet the environmental standards, and will be designed to world class energy efficiency standards,” the Minister said.
“On the petrochemical front, our flagship company, GPIC, which is a true model of fruitful cooperation between three Gulf countries represented by Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), Petrochemical Industries Company (PIC) of Kuwait and nogaholding of the Kingdom of Bahrain have had a history of outstanding achievements on all fronts and are planning to expand their capacity in the future at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion.”
“People at NOGA and the NOGA family of companies are guided by the aspirations and goals of Bahrain Vision 2030. That Vision considers the development of the citizens of Bahrain as one of the pillars upon which the success of the program rests. We at NOGA vigorously pursue this Vision and our companies spend upwards of $25 million per year on training our staff to attain the skills necessary to run the Bahraini economy of tomorrow,” he said.
With a vision towards the future, we in Bahrain have also taken steps to complement our energy supply sources by planning to implement two pilot projects in the renewable energy area, namely two plants generating 5 Megawatts of electricity each, based on solar and wind technologies. And I am pleased to announce in this conference that one hour ago we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Petrosolar to start execution one of these these pilot projects. Once the trials with the pilot plants will be successful, we expect that this form of complementary power generation will become a mainstay on the Bahrain generation landscape,” he added.