Royal Boskalis Westminster, a Netherland-based dredging and maritime infrastructure services provider, is set to start work within a month on the planned $513-million liquid terminal at Duqm port in the Al Wusta region of Oman, said a report.

The construction work will take 32 to 33 months for completion, reported Times of Oman, citing a top official.

Presently, Royal Boskalis is working on a detailed engineering design and mobilising equipment and materials for construction work, said Lee Chee Khian, the chief executive officer of the Special Economic Zone in Duqm (Sezad).

“An initial front-end engineering design (Feed) was carried out by our consultant Worley Parsons at the time of the tender,” Khian stated.

According to him, the scope of work includes engineering, design, procurement and construction of a liquid berth terminal. The liquid berth will be operational sometime in 2020, he added.

Various dredging and civil activities will be executed by Boskalis, which include the deepening of the port basin to a depth of 18 m, reclamation of land, construction of a 1-km-long quay wall, a double berth jetty island and a stone revetment.

The dredging scope will be executed by the new mega cutter Helios, which will be taken into service in mid-2017, and a jumbo hopper and medium-sized trailer suction hopper dredger, he stated.

The liquid terminal, which is linked to the ambitious development of the mega 230,000-barrels-per-day capacity-greenfield refinery project is currently under development near the port, will be large enough to handle the import and export requirements of the refinery.

Duqm Refinery, the $7 billion-joint venture between the state-owned Oman Oil Company and Kuwait Petroleum International, is also expected to start operations in 2020.

Both companies had signed a joint venture agreement last month for building the refinery.

An engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the main processing plant of the refinery is expected to be awarded soon.