Oman and Kuwait's $9bn Duqm refinery: EPC began in 2018, the ribbon came in 2024

The Duqm refinery was pitched as the largest investment two Arab Gulf states had ever made in each other: a 230,000 barrels-per-day greenfield refinery on Oman's Arabian Sea coast, 600km from Muscat, owned 50/50 by Oman's OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International. In February 2018 the JV, DRPIC, awarded three EPC packages worth roughly $5.75bn — Petrofac with Samsung Engineering, Técnicas Reunidas with Daewoo E&C, and CB&I with Saipem on the export terminal, tank farm and an 80km crude pipeline. Notice to proceed came in June 2018; in December 2018 the project closed about $4.6bn of financing.

By August 2020 the venture reported overall progress of 68.4% and still described start of operations as expected in 2022. It did not happen in 2022. Start-up processes were only completed in September 2023, with commercial operations promised by the end of that year, and the official inauguration — performed jointly by Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Mishal and Oman's Sultan Haitham — took place on 7 February 2024. The plant was presented as a $9bn project that would lift Oman's total refining capacity to 500,000 bpd.

Two years on, the refinery itself has been a vindication: 633 export shipments by February 2026, throughput pushed to 255,000 bpd, about 110% of nameplate capacity. The failure was not in the columns and furnaces. It was in the delivery structure — a schedule set at financial close, an interface-heavy EPC split across five contractors on a remote greenfield site, and two years of paying for an asset that produced nothing while it was finished.

About $9bn committed; first inauguration two years after the 2022 startup that the $4.6bn project financing was underwritten against.

The 50/50 split between OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International was fixed government-to-government, so neither side could de-scope; the whole $4.6bn financing sat on a single startup date.

The work was sliced into three EPC packages run by five large contractors on a remote 9km² site, stacking interface risk at exactly the joints where a schedule breaks.

The 2022 'expected' startup was announced while a third of the work was still outstanding — a target the progress reports themselves did not support.

Completion slipped through 2023 even after start-up processes finished, because commissioning an export terminal, tank farm and pipeline had been planned as if they were one contractor's problem.

When several EPC packages on a government-to-government JV slip at once, the schedule is the first casualty — and sovereign prestige, not the business case, carries the asset.

The refinery was inaugurated on 7 February 2024 by the Emir of Kuwait and the Sultan of Oman. By February 2026 its CEO reported 633 export shipments since startup, 284 of them in 2025, with operating capacity raised from 230,000 to 255,000 bpd — 110% of nameplate — and local-content spending at 12% of procurement. Oman's refining capacity roughly doubled toward 500,000 bpd. The joint venture survived; the two lost years are visible only in the gap between the 2018 financing documents and the 2024 ribbon.