Kenya to re-tender 700 MW LNG facility
Date
September 08, 2014
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Bids for construction and operation of a gas plant in Kenya failed to meet the set criteria and government's plans to generate 5,000 megawatts of electricity in 18 months suffer a serious setback.
The government had asked companies to tender for construction of the $1.44 billion Dongo Kundu 700 MW Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) factory. A total of 36 firms responded to the request for expression of interest. Later, the Government of Kenya shortlisted ten of them.
In the last stage of the tender process, only two firms submitted bids, however, none of them met the timelines. Both teams proposed to build the plant over two years, contrary to the Request for Proposal tender which stipulated a timeline of 18 months.
Other potential bidders wrote letters saying they would bid if the implementation process was extended to 24 months.
The Minister said the evaluation committee had recommended to the Treasury’s Public Private Partnership (PPP) unit to sanction a repeat of the process and not to open the non-responsive financial bids.
Local sources comment that among the bidders were China Petroleum, Tata Power in consortium with Gulf Energy, Globeleq, Mitsui & Co, Toyota Tyusho, Marubeni Corporation, Samsung C&T, GMR Energy, Quantum power and GDF Suez.
The successful bidder for the Dongo Kundu plant will be required to build a floating storage and re-gasification unit with sufficient capacity and infrastructure to supply natural gas to power plants using heavy fuel oil.
