Vietnam to scrap crude oil import tax

By Dat Nguyen September 18, 2019 | 12:43 am PT

Dung Quat Refinery in Quang Ngai Province, central Vietnam. Photo courtesy of Binh Son Refinery and Petrochemical.

Vietnam will remove the current five percent import tax on crude oil imports starting November 1 as domestic supply dwindles.

The decision, recently signed by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, follows a March statement by the Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Company that its Dung Quat oil refinery could suffer losses due to a shortage of domestic crude.

Last month, Binh Son imported its first-ever batch of Nigerian crude to feed the refinery in Quang Ngai Province. The refinery has a capacity of 130,000 barrels per day.

Binh Son deputy CEO, Nguyen Van Hoi, had said earlier that the company would have to import 2-3 million barrels of U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude in the second half of this year for the refinery.

From January to August, the country imported 5.57 million tonnes of crude, more than double that of the same period last year, according to Vietnam Customs. The value of the imports was $2.6 billion.

Domestic oil output fell by 6.9 percent in the same period, according to the General Statistics Office.

Vietnam has two operational oil refineries with a combined processing capacity of 330,000 barrels of crude oil per day.