Qatar’s Oil and Energy Minister has announced that the country has postponed some of its downstream mega projects in order to take advantage of lower construction costs, according to the Al-Hayat newspaper.
Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah said that the projects in question were the Shaheen refinery and the Aromatic project. A spokesman from Qatar Petroleum had said in a statement last week that the Shaheen project would be reviewed in order to take advantage of more favourable construction costs.
“When these projects were first concieved, the costs were very high, but now we expect the costs to decline by 30% or more. This will help us to re-structure the cost and take benefit of the decline of the prices,” Attiyah told the Arabic language newspaper at a conference in Paris.
However, the Qatari Minister did say that other mega-projects were still going ahead in the country, citing liquefied natural gas lines, a polyethylene and aluminium plant and a condensates plant.
“All these projects will be implemented this year or next year so that they will be able to produce and export within two years,” Al-Hayat quoted him as saying.
