Vietnam opens its first oil refinery today, overcoming the withdrawal of foreign partners including Total SA, and international criticism that the $3 billion project is in the wrong place and won't boost the economy, Bloomberg reported.
The 148,000 barrel-a-day plant, located at Dung Quat Bay in the central province of Quang Ngai, away from the main industrial hubs and offshore oil fields, opens at a time of excess supply in refined products and slumping crude prices.
The opening of the refinery, designed to meet about one- third of Vietnam's fuel demand next year, comes more than two decades after the Communist Party-ruled nation began a shift to a market economy, helping it shed the label of being one of the world's poorest nations.
The refinery will be operated by state-owned Vietnam Oil & Gas Group, after the company pushed on alone with the project in spite of the loss of Total and Russia's OAO Zarubezhneft as partners, and amid criticism that political considerations had trumped economic efficiency.
"The determination to prevail in a difficult situation is a Vietnamese characteristic," said Raymond Burghardt, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam and now director of seminars at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
"In the case of the refinery, the determined side of the Vietnamese character was not necessarily consistent with another characteristic that we are often glad to see in the Vietnamese people, which is pragmatism," he said.
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