POSCO E&C wins $900 mil. power project in Philippines

Oh Kun-soo, third from left, POSCO E&C vice president, poses with Donald Gray, center, project director of the Mashinloc Expansion Project, after signing a $900 million contract to build two coal-fired power plants, in Manila, Tuesday. / Courtesy of POSCO E&C

By Park Jin-hai

POSCO E&C has signed a contract with Masinloc Power Partners (MPPCL) to build thermal power plants that will cost $900 million in the Philippines.

MPPCL is an affiliate of U.S. power company AES, which operates an accumulated 34,732 megawatts of power plants in 18 countries.

Under the terms of the contract, POSCO E&C will engineer, procure and build the two 300-megawatt coal-fired power plants in Zambales, 250 kilometers northwest of Manila.

The plants will use a supercritical steam generator, a boiler that operates at very high pressure to produce power. This will provide it with much higher fuel efficiency and produce less carbon dioxide compared with other conventional power plants.

POSCO E&C will build the plants over 38 months.

“The Masinloc power project has been part of Philippine government initiatives to meet soaring demand for electricity,” a POSCO E&C official said Tuesday. “Since 2013, we have been working on the project, analyzing the local data and entering the tender. Last month, we received the letter of award from the MPPCL.”

Korean builders are experiencing a fall in overseas contracts this year, because Middle East countries have reduced or postponed contracts affected by low oil prices.

The company says it won the bid based on mutual trust that goes back to 2006.

“We first won a contract with AES to build a thermal power plant in Chile in 2006,” the company official said. “With that contract, we entered the Chilean energy market. We have kept mutual trust and the strategic partnership strong since then, which brought us three additional thermal power plant projects in the Latin American country.”