Oil sands

Fluor Corporation has been awarded a contract worth approximately $570 million for work on the Long Lake Project, a joint venture between OPTI Canada and Nexen Canada, to produce a premium synthetic crude oil from oil sands bitumen.

The Long Lake project will integrate steam-assisted gravity drainage extraction technology and employ a new approach to the on-site upgrading process. Together, these techniques, it claims, will provide a significant operating cost advantage over current approaches to synthetic crude production from oil sands bitum at a comparable capital cost.

Fluor will perform detailed engineering and procurement services for the three main upgrader process units and for the utilities and offsite areas of the project. It has been extensively involved with the project's front-end engineering and design since December 2001.

Spanning more than 85 square miles, OPTI/Nexen's Long Lake lease is strategically situated in an area of high-quality, high-prospective oil sands just southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Long Lake's recoverable bitumen reserves and resources have been independently estimated at 1.9 billion barrels.

The upgrader will produce about 60,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil per day from heavy oil recovered from underground deposits by steam injection. The synthetic crude oil will be sold to refineries for further processing and ultimately reach customers as motor fuel and other petroleum products.

The upgrader, scheduled for startup in July 2007, will be the first facility to fully license Fluor's sulphur recovery technology and will represent the world's first implementation of the OrCrude upgrading technology developed by OPTI's parent company, Ormat Industries of Israel.

Fluor will execute the work primarily out of its offices in Calgary, Canada, and New Delhi, India. Nearly 600 Fluor employees will contribute to the project.