EdF-led team wins $400 mln Vietnam power plant bid
HANOI - A consortium led by Electricite de France
(EdF) on Wednesday won a bid to construct a $400 million power plant
in southern Vietnam under build-operate-transfer (BOT) terms, officials in
Hanoi announced.
The consortium members also included heavy engineering group Alstom
along with Sumitomo Corp and Tokyo Electric Power Co, said Ngo Duc
Hanh, deputy director at the Ministry of Industry.
Officials at a ceremony to announce the winning consortium for Vietnam's
first competitively-bid BOT contract said the operational life of the deal
would be 20 years.
The 700 megawatt Phu My 2.2 gas-fired plant will be built in Ba Ria-Vung
Tau province near Vietnam's commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City.
Phu My 2.2 will be part of the giant 3,600 megawatt Phu My complex,
which is expected to get natural gas from the Nam Con Son Basin in
waters off southeastern Vietnam, although a deal to exploit that natural
resource has not yet been sealed.
Officials said the consortium would hold further negotiations with
Vietnam's state oil monopoly Petrovietnam and Electricity of Vietnam but
that they hoped an investment licence would be issued by the end of the
year.
Neither government officials nor members of the winning consortium
would say what electricity tariff had been included in the bid.
The issue of pricing has haunted other potential power plant projects, with
foreign investors unable to agree a price with Hanoi that they say would
offer a reasonable rate of return on their investment.
British Petroleum and Norway's Statoil have been deadlocked with
Petrovietnam over pricing the gas from the Nam Con Son Basin since
May 1997. The reserves, Vietnam's largest, were discovered in the
mid-1990s.
The Phu My 2.2 plant has been supported by the World Bank, which has
offered $75 million as a financing guarantee for international lenders to the
project.
Vietnam's demand for electricity has grown since the communist-ruled
country embarked on economic reforms in the late 1980s.
Last October, state utility Electricity of Vietnam said power demand
would grow 15 percent annually from 1996-2000, 13 percent from
2000-2005 and about 12 percent from 2005-2010.
Vietnam's current generating capacity was 5,000 MW, with a forecast
7,000-8,000 MW in 2000 and 14,000 MW by 2010, the utility had said.
Reuters - January 27, 1999.
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