Fluor Daniel Wins $500-Million Indonesian Pact : Construction: The Fluor Corp. subsidiary would expand a refinery it built 15 years ago.

Fluor Corp. announced Tuesday that its principal engineering subsidiary, Fluor Daniel, has won a $500-million contract to expand an oil refinery it built 15 years ago for Pertamina, Indonesia’s national oil company.

The contract is the largest Fluor has reported since the fiscal year began Nov. 1, said company spokeswoman Deborah Land.

“It is part of what we have been saying--that the Pacific Rim . . . as well as South America, the Middle East and North America, has real strong potential for significant projects in the hydrocarbon area,” Land said.

Several countries in those regions have extensive oil reserves, Land said, and have been planning for some time to upgrade and expand their production facilities.

“We’ve been trying to position ourselves for when they go forward,” she said.

The contract is contingent on Pertamina obtaining financing for the project, but Land said Fluor expected that hurdle to be cleared. Once financing is secured, the contract would be added to Fluor’s backlog, or secured contracts not yet completed, which totaled $9.7 billion at the close of the quarter ended Jan. 31.

The expansion project is scheduled to be completed in 39 months, Fluor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Les McCraw said in a prepared statement.

Fluor Daniel built the original 100,000-barrel-per-day Cilacap refinery in 1976. Just seven years later, Fluor Daniel completed a $1.2-billion expansion project at the refinery, tripling its daily capacity to 300,000 barrels.

This latest expansion would increase overall capacity for the production of transportation fuels, lube oil and asphalt by about 15%. The contract calls for the removal of production bottlenecks, as well as the addition of a third complex to refine lube oil for export and to manufacture asphalt, of which there is a shortage in Indonesia.

The announcement of the contract at 11 a.m. (2 p.m. EST), two hours before the stock market closed, did not keep Fluor shares from finishing at $46.625, down $3 from the previous day.

Fluor announced Monday that its Missouri-based lead mining subsidiary, Doe Run, was curtailing production and laying off workers in response to global oversupply, but Paine Webber analyst Mark Altman said that move came as no surprise.

“There’s nothing really you can attribute (the drop in price) to,” Altman said. “The market was very weak, and Fluor is a somewhat volatile stock. . . . The announcement of the Indonesia job is certainly a plus. It was expected that they would get it, and we suspect that there’s more to come from Indonesia.”