Kuwait to offer $3 bln refinery contracts -paper

KUWAIT, July 29 (Reuters) - State refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) plans to invite bids by September for contracts worth a total of $3 billion for its new 615,000 barrel per day al-Zour oil refinery, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

The tender will be open to local contractors, al-Seyassah reported without disclosing the source of the information. KNPC could not be immediately reached for comment.

In May, KNPC awarded deals worth $8.4 billion to build the refinery, the Middle East's largest, to four South Korean firms and a Japanese company.

Kuwait has budgeted about $15 billion for the project. The refinery is scheduled to start operations in 2012, two years later than initially planned.

The world's seventh-largest oil exporter plans to boost refining capacity to 1.415 million bpd from 930,000 bpd with the new plant. (Reporting by Rania El Gamal, editing by Anthony Barker)