The idea of a Vietnamese oil refinery dates to the 1980s, when planners envisioned a facility near Vũng Tàu, close to the offshore fields that had been producing crude since the late 1970s. In 1988, crews began clearing the intended construction site of unexploded ordnance left from the war — a reminder that economic development here started by disarming the ground itself. But the project stalled in 1991. When it revived, the site shifted: first to Van Phong Bay north of Nha Trang, then further north still to Dung Quất Bay in Quảng Ngãi Province. French oil giant Total evaluated the new location in the early 1990s and walked away in 1995, saying Dung Quất made no economic sense. A replacement consortium including South Korea's LG Group and Malaysia's Petronas also withdrew. The industrial logic kept pointing elsewhere. Vietnam's government kept pointing to Dung Quất.

In 1998, Vietnam and Russia signed an intergovernmental agreement establishing VietRoss, a joint venture to design and build the refinery. The Front End Engineering Design contract brought in PetroVietnam, Russia's Zarubezhneft, and American firm Foster Wheeler Energy — a genuinely international collaboration on a project that international investors had already twice abandoned. The original start date of 2000 slipped. Then slipped again. On Christmas Day 2002, Vietnam and Russia formally dissolved their intergovernmental agreement. The project became a solo endeavor of PetroVietnam, the state oil company, proceeding without foreign partners toward a goal that foreign partners had consistently questioned. Construction finally moved forward, slowly, through the mid-2000s.

On 22 February 2009, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng inaugurated the Dung Quất Refinery. The final cost: $3 billion, more than double the 1994 estimate of $1.4 billion. But the economic impact was immediate and dramatic. In 2009 alone, industrial gross output in Quảng Ngãi Province increased by 144.7 percent. The province's industrial share of GDP jumped from 36.2 percent to 46.3 percent in a single year. A region that had been predominantly agricultural found itself home to a major industrial installation almost overnight. The refinery's designed capacity of 6.5 million tons of crude annually — roughly 140,000 barrels per day — made Vietnam, for the first time, a nation that processed its own petroleum.

Dung Quất sits at the center of the Dung Quất Economic Zone, a sprawling industrial development area that the refinery anchored. The complex includes not just the 110-hectare processing facility but a crude tank farm of 42 hectares, a product tank farm of 36 hectares, and a product harbor area covering 135 hectares — an industrial port city grafted onto a coastline that was agricultural farmland a generation earlier. The refinery processes crude into fuels and petrochemical feedstocks, reducing Vietnam's dependence on imported refined products. Six months after opening, a technical failure in the residue fluid catalytic cracking unit forced a temporary shutdown in August 2009 — the kind of teething trouble that comes with any complex industrial facility. It was repaired and operations resumed. After twenty years of delays and disappointments, a few weeks of downtime barely registered.