Pakistan's refinery project

Pakistan's refinery project

KARACHI (AFP): Work started here yesterday on the country's first hydrocracker refinery project, jointly sponsored by Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said.

Hydrocracker is one of the most recently developed refining techniques where a wide range of petroleum products are produced by processing heavy residual oil. At the inauguration ceremony, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto described it as the first step toward Pakistan's efforts to attain self-sufficiency in the production of petroleum products.

Pakistan is facing a shortage of 80 million tons of petroleum products.

The more than US$530 million project is to be completed in 1998.

It is jointly sponsored by the State Petroleum Refining and Petrochemical Corporation (PERAC) and Crescent Petroleum International (CPI) of the UAE.

CPI will contribute 35 percent of the equity in foreign currency and PERAC will share about 35 percent in local currency while the general public will contribute the remaining 30 percent, officials said.