KUWAIT CITY, 2 May 2005 — State-run Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) expects to start inviting bids for its fourth oil refinery with a capacity of 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) early next year, a top oil executive said yesterday. “We are still in the front-end engineering stage which is scheduled to be completed in February. After that we will invite bids for the project,” KNPC Chairman Sami Al-Rasheed told AFP. The new refinery will boost the oil-rich emirate’s refining capacity to about 1.5 million bpd. Rasheed said that the cost of the project has not yet been precisely determined, but it will be “well in excess of $4 billion.”