Contract Signing Kicks Off Midyan Project

TABUK, - -Saudi Aramco has launched its first project in the industrial Tabuk region, where procurement and construction work for a gas plant in the Midyan gas field in the Kingdom’s north is now underway.

The recent signing of the In-Kingdom engineering, procurement and construction contract (IK-EPC) with Dammam-based Larsen and Toubro Arabia (L&T) signaled the official start of a project that is expected to see the Midyan Gas Plant fully operational by 2016.

Fahad Al-Helal, the executive director of Project Management at Saudi Aramco, stated that the project supports the company’s corporate strategy of efficiently meeting the Kingdom’s energy demands while providing grassroots facilities that help create career opportunities in the region.

The plant will be producing and processing 75 million standard cubic feet per day of nonassociated gas and 4,500 barrels per day of condensate.

Al-Helal noted that “the project will include the establishment of two pipelines stretching a length of 98 kilometers to deliver sales gas and stabilized hydrocarbon liquids to a sophisticated power plant near Duba to generate electricity with high efficiency and to avoid burning high value diesel.”

The plant site is situated about 195 kilometers west of Tabuk and 135 kilometers north of Duba.

The Midyan field was discovered in 1992 during the Red Sea coastal plain exploration, and a study was conducted in mid-2009 to evaluate various alternatives for the development of the field and identify ways to optimize economic production.

Based on Saudi Electric Co.’s plans for the development of regional power generation and distribution, and the potential for developing a future regional industrial cluster, the option to utilize Midyan production as fuel to generate power in Duba was presented and accepted by the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources (MinPet) in 2010 for further development.