Eleven years have elapsed since Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) took the “Eastern Refinery Unit-2” project to enhance the country’s petroleum refining capacity, but there has been no headway in its implementation so far. According to official sources, BPC is now evaluating a technical offer of Technip, a French engineering company, which was engaged through an unsolicited process for creating Front End Engineering Design (FEED) involving Tk 371.81 crore for the proposed ERL unit-2 through a contract signed in January, 2017. “We’re now evaluating the technical offer of Technip to meet our compliances to be qualified before calling for a financial offer,” said Syed Mehedi Hasan, director, operation & planning of PPC.  Read: Quick energy supply: Cabinet approves 5-yr extension of special provision “Techmip has placed some 650 observations and we addressed most of them and negotiations are going on to settle the remaining 175 of them. Now we hope we'll be able to settle them within the current month,” he told UNB. The Unit-2 project was taken by BPC in 2010 to enhance the company’s capacity to 4.5 million metric tons by adding 3 million metric tons from the new one. Currently, the Unit-1, installed in 1968 by the same French company, has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million metric tons. Read BPC’s ballooning operations call for augmented manpower  Technip completed the FEED for ERL Unit-2 and then placed it to BPC for negotiations. Once the technical negotiations are completed, the financial offer of the Technip will be opened for the final negotiation to go for a contract, said the BPC director.   State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid said he believes the evaluation and negotiations of Tecnip’s technical offer will be concluded within a week or two. “Then the French company will be asked to submit a financial offer for negotiations. If we accept the offer, we’ll proceed to award the contract to Technip,” he told UNB. Read FY21 ADP implementation: Power Division reaches 97.74% target, Energy Division 104.27% The whole process of implementation of the ERL-2 is being done under the Speedy Power and Energy Supply (Special) Act 2010 which allows his ministry to award any contract to any company without competing the bidding process. “We’ve preferred Technip for the project as it has a proven track record,” he said.