Contracts & Projects Tracker: Oil & Gas

Foster Wheeler has signed an Asian enterprise framework agreement with Shell Global Solutions for the provision of engineering and project management services for Shell’s downstream projects in Asia. The agreement is for a five-year period, with an option to extend for another five years. Work will be released under individual work orders.

KBR has won a general works contract for the construction of a 200m standard cubic feet per day sweet natural gas processing plant near Fort St. John, British Columbia. Canadian subsidiary, KBR Wabi, will execute all mechanical, structural, architectural, concrete (structural and other), electrical and instrument works for the project which will commercialise recent shale gas discoveries.

Eni and Rosneft have signed a strategic agreement for the joint development of licenses in the Black Sea and the Barents Sea on the Russian shelf, the exchange of technologies and personnel as well as Rosneft’s acquisition of a stake in Eni’s international projects. Eni and Rosneft will set up JVs, with Eni holding 33.33% in each, to develop the Fedynsky and Tsentralno-Barentsevsky licenses offshore of the Barents Sea, and Zapadno-Cernomorsky license in the Black sea. Eni will fund the exploration needed to confirm the commercial value of the deposits, which are estimated to hold total recoverable resources of 36bn boe.

The UK’s Technology Strategy Board is to invest up to £1m in SME-led feasibility studies to stimulate innovation in the oil & gas sector and accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies. Study proposals should focus on the areas of increasing oil and gas recovery efficiencies, improving asset integrity and extending the life of offshore installations.

CB&I has reported first quarter net income of $59.5m on revenues of $1.2bn for the first quarter of 2012, compared with $50.5m on $954m in Q1/11. New awards totaled $1.7bn compared with $1.0bn a year ago, increasing the company’s backlog to $9.6bn. Included in these new awards were several oil sands opportunities, a FEED study for a US LNG export project, and a US petrochemical expansion project.

Kiewit-Kvaerner Contractors, a 50/50 JV between Peter Kiewit Infrastructure and Kvaerner, has been authorised by ExxonMobil Canada Properties to proceed with work on the Hebron Project gravity based structure project in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The authorisation follows substantial completion of FEED services and awards the next phase, which includes detailed EPC-related services. Kvaerner estimates its share of this work to be about $125-150m.

Total has announced first production from its Islay gas field in the northern North Sea, 440km NE of Aberdeen. Mainly located in the UK sector and partly in the Norwegian sector and lying in a water depth of 120m, the field has estimated reserves of nearly 17m boe. It has already reached its expected production of 15k boe per day. Islay’s single well is tied-back to the Alwyn North platform via existing subsea infrastructure. This project will help extend the life of Total’s fully owned Alwyn production hub.

Shell is reviewing the future of its last UK manufacturing site in Stanlow, Cheshire, according to trade union Unite. The move, it said, could mark the end of the group’s manufacturing effort in the UK. (Read more)

Andrew Palmer & Associates, part of the Penspen Group, is to provide detailed design services to EPC Offshore Ltd in support of Ithaca Energy’s Greater Stella Area (GSA) development. The contract follows on from Penspen’s recent work for EPC Offshore on the FEED for this development. It covers the phase 1 subsea structures and associated tie-in infrastructure, consisting of the Stella main drill centre manifold, northern drill centre manifold, export riser base, oil and gas export tee assemblies. The Stella field is 280km east-southeast of Aberdeen in a water depth of about 85m. Ithaca has contracted EPC Offshore to provide project management of the subsea and pipelines elements of the development last year.

Total and the partners of the Bongkot JV have started of production from the Greater Bongkot South (GBS) gas and condensate field in the Gulf of Thailand. The JV is operated by PTTEP (44.45%), alongside partners Total (33.33%) and BG Group (22.22%). The offshore GBS development consists of a central processing platform, a living quarter platform and 13 wellhead platforms. The processing platform has a capacity of 350m cubic feet of gas per day and 15k barrels of condensate per day. Gas is exported via a new build spur line to the PTT grid while condensate is exported to an existing FSO vessel.

Aker Solutions is investing $87m to double the capacity of its manufacturing plants in Tranby, Norway, and Port Klang, Malaysia. In addition, a new service base will also be established in Malaysia. These planned, it said, investments respond to a wave of existing orders and growing market demand. They will, added Aker, facilitate market share growth within subsea production technologies, including subsea trees, control systems, pumps and work-over systems.

A/S Norske Shell has awarded Kvaerner an NOK6bn EPCM contract for modifications and projects at the Ormen Lange/Nyhamna onshore facilities on the west coast of Norway. The contract is a framework agreement with duration of six years, and options for additional two plus two years. The Nyhamna gas plant processes natural gas from the Ormen Lange gas field located in the Møre Basin in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea. (Read more)

The Shah Deniz consortium has decided to commence FEED work on the estimated $25-billion Shah Deniz Stage 2 project in Azerbaijan, BP has announced. The project will bring 16bn cubic metres of gas per year from the Caspian Sea to markets in Turkey and Europe, with first exports due around the end of 2017. (Read more)

BP has awarded Jacobs Engineering Group a contract to provide engineering and procurement services, as well as engineering assistance during construction, commissioning and startup for a major shutdown of the fluid catalytic cracker unit (FCCU) at the 400,000 bpd Rotterdam refinery - Europe’s second largest refinery. Jacobs is currently executing a multi-year programme of micro, mid-sized and large projects at the refinery. For the FCCU shutdown, Jacobs is to replace the end-of-life power recovery train and regenerator ballistic separator and cyclones.

Alfa Laval is to supply fresh water generators to an oil platform in the North Sea. The SEK50m order is due for delivery this year. The units will convert seawater into potable water, for consumption onboard an oil platform in the Norwegian part of the North Sea. The fresh water produced will also be used as process water onboard the platform. The oil platform is one of many operating the Greater Ekofisk area and this particular platform is being upgraded to prolong the “lifetime” with another 40 years.

Aker Solutions has entered a long-term agreement with Statoil to provide a full range of heavy well intervention and light drilling services on the Norwegian continental shelf. The contract period is for eight years, with options for three further two-year periods (2+2+2). Contract value for the initial eight-year period is approximately USD 1.9 billion. Work will be performed from a new build Category B well intervention rig, which will be owned and operated by Aker Solutions’ subsidiary Aker Oilfield Services.

DSME and STX, two of the world’s largest shipbuilders, have chosen to install Honeywell’s automation systems in five vessels commissioned by ship owners in Norway, Russia and the US for transporting LNG. The technology will manage the machinery and cargo areas of the vessels, including the cargo emergency shutdown system. The projects are valued at more than $8m.

Clough AMEC has won an AU$30m contract for the operability, reliability and maintainability (ORM) component of Chevron’s Wheatstone facility offshore Western Australia. This involves building the maintenance database, assuring operational readiness for the offshore facility, including writing of all operations procedures, all training and development programmes, and operations engineering and support services. The Wheatstone project is a JV between Chevron, Apache, Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co., Shell and Kyushu Electric Power Co. When completed in 2015, the Wheatstone Processing platform will be one of Australia’s largest offshore facilities.

Under a two-year frame agreement, Aker Solutions will be the sole supplier for all of Egyptian oil giant Bapetco’s surface wellhead equipment, installation and lifecycle services operations in the Western Desert of Egypt. The contract will be delivered out of Aker Solutions’ surface products manufacturing centre in Batam, Indonesia. In 2009, Aker Solutions upgraded the Batam facility in order to increase its production capacity.

Clough AMEC is to provide maintenance support to the 1.3bn m3/yr onshore gas treatment plant and the offshore unmanned wellhead platform for Eni’s Blacktip project, supplying gas to Australia’s Northern Territory. It will support routine and campaign maintenance along with consultancy services, engineering, procurement, and management of subcontractors and fabrication. The three-year contract, with extension options, will be supported out of Clough AMECs Darwin office.

Sheffield Forgemasters’ offshore division Vulcan SFM has recently completed the fabrication of cast steel pad-eyes into large tubular sections made of rolled steel-plate for Offshore Group Newcastle. The tubular sections form part of the leg of a North Sea platform which will be lifted into place using the cast pad-eyes. (More on Process Engineering)

TOTAL has awarded Foster Wheeler an engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCm) services contract for the revamp of a hydrodesulfurisation unit at its refinery in Antwerp, Belgium. The revamp is to enable the refinery to produce jet fuel with a sulfur content below 30ppm, and diesel with a sulfur content below 10ppm, in line with EU requirements.

BP is to sell its interests in its southern gas assets (SGA) in the UK North Sea to Perenco UK Ltd for $400m - part of a BP plant to divest $38bn of assets between 2010-13. Including the agreement to sell SGA, the company has now announced divestments with an expected value totalling approximately $23bn. BP said it expected that impacted employees working for SGA would transfer to Perenco.

ExxonMobil Upstream Research Co. has licensed its multi-zone stimulation technology (MZST) well treatment process to a subsidiary of Weatherford Int. Ltd. The MZST process can be used to rapidly and reliably stimulate multiple zones in a single operation, yielding improved well economics. The MZST process can be particularly beneficial for hydraulic fracturing operations in tight gas, shale gas and coal bed methane wells that target multiple reservoir zones, thick reservoir sections or long reservoir intervals where multiple stimulation treatments are required.

Kuwait Gulf Oil Co. has engaged Penspen Group to project manage the detailed design and construction of a new gas & condensate export system (GCES) from Khafji, Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait. Penspen will manage EPC contractor Technip. The project is to deliver condensate and gas product to Kuwait, assist in reducing gas flaring, and recover hydrocarbon resources. The new export system will include: Gas facilities carrying 40MMscfd of gas via pipeline. 110km of 12-inch diameter export pipeline, of which about 47km will be offshore. Penspen will also assist with the commissioning of the final scheme.

BP is to lease thousands of acres in northeast Ohio for future oil and gas production in the Utica/Point Pleasant shale formation. BP signed an agreement to lease about 84,000 acres in Trumbull County, Ohio with a group representing area mineral owners. The Utica/Point Pleasant shale is at a depth of about 6,000 feet and of similar thickness to the Marcellus. The recoverable Utica shale potential is estimated at between 1.3 and 5.5bn barrels of oil and between 3.8 and 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. BP already has active shale positions in the Woodford, Haynesville, Fayetteville and Eagle Ford.

Aker Solutions has been awarded an NOK105m contract by A/S Norske Shell, to deliver subsea connection systems for production flowlines and umbilicals for the Draugen field on the Norwegian continental shelf. Management, engineering and procurement of the systems will be performed at Aker’s head office in Fornebu, Norway. Equipment deliveries will be made from 2012-13. The Draugen field is about 140km from Kristiansund, Norway, at a sea depth of 250 metres.

Alfa Laval has won an SEK130m plate heat exchanger order from a ‘big oil company’ in Brazil. Delivery is scheduled for 2012. The heat exchangers will be installed at offshore production platforms where they will be used for heat recovery in the main separation process. Many of the offshore oil fields outside of Brazil contain heavy crude oil mixed with large amounts of water, which requires a lot of heat when separating the water from the oil. Heat exchangers make it possible to recover heat from the process itself to heat up the heavy crude oil, resulting in a very energy efficient solution.

Foster Wheeler has been awarded the basic design and FEED contract by Complejo GNL del Este for a new LNG receiving terminal and jetty to be built in San Pedro de Marcorís, Dominican Republic. FW had completed a feasibility study for the selection of the most suitable technology for the new terminal, which will be designed for a send-out capacity of 240m standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d), with an LNG storage tank of 160k cubic meters. The design will also consider future expansion(s) up to 700 MMscf/d

AMEC has been awarded a project management consultancy services contract by Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Co. (ADMA OPCO) for the ‘execute phase’ of the Nasr Phase-1 and Umm Lulu Phase-1 field development projects offshore Abu Dhabi. The ‘multi-million dollar’, 30-month contract covers the EPC phase of these offshore developments.

Foster Wheeler has been awarded a contract by CJSC Antipinsky Refinery for the engineering and material supply of a new fired heater and air preheating system for the Antipinsky Refinery, Tyumen, Russia. The fired heater will be part of a new crude distillation unit. FW’s work is to be completed by the end of 2012. The deal follows an award by CJSC in 2011 for the technology license and basic design package for FW’s selective yield delayed coking technology, and the basic design package for a vacuum distillation unit.

Fluor Corp. has been awarded an engineering, procurement and construction management contract by Joule to design and build a renewable fuel production facility in New Mexico. The facility is intended to test and scale up a process for the commercial production of liquid fuels via Joule’s technology, which uses sunlight to convert industrial waste carbon dioxide into liquid hydrocarbons, ethanol or chemical products.

Premier Oil has awarded Wood Group PSN a £250m contract to deliver integrated operations and maintenance support services to the Balmoral FPV in the North Sea. PSN is to provide managed onshore and offshore operations and maintenance services for the semi-submersible production vessel, 122 miles NE of Aberdeen, servicing the Balmoral, Stirling, Beauly, Brenda, Nicol and Burghley fields. The ‘life-of-field’ award, estimated to 2020, and will employ over 70 offshore and 15 onshore staff.

Wood Group PSN has secured a contract extension from Shell in the UK to deliver midstream engineering and construction services to the St Fergus and Mossmoran gas plants. The £75m, two-year contract includes an option for a further two-year extension. (More on Process Engineering)

Freeport LNG Expansion has awarded a JV between Zachry Industrial and CB&I a FEED contract for the Freeport Liquefaction Project near Freeport, Texas. The JV is to engineer and design three 4,400ktpa LNG liquefaction trains, with pretreatment facilities, to be sited near the existing regasification terminal: developing proposals for a one-train and a two-train initial development so that Freeport LNG can choose the optimum size of the initial phase of the project.

Qatar Petroleum (QP) and Qatar Petrochemical Co. (QAPCO) are to develop a new petrochemical complex in Ras Laffan Industrial City. The project includes a world-scale steam cracker, with the feedstock coming from natural gas plants in Ras Laffan. Due for completion in 2018, it will produce 1,400ktpa of ethylene, 850ktpa of HDPE, 430ktpa of LLDPE, 760ktpa of polypropylene, 83ktpa of butadiene. QP has an 80% equity interest in the project, QAPCO 20%. The complex will help Qatar to exploit its abundant natural gas resources.

The BP-operated Azerbaijan International Operating Co. has awarded Emerson Process Management a ’multi-million-dollar’ contract to automate a new offshore platform in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea. (More on Process Engineering)

Eni has announces a new ’giant’ natural gas discovery at the Mamba North 1 prospect, in Area 4 Offshore Mozambique, encountering a mineral potential of 7.5 tcf of gas in place. This new discovery follows its Mamba South discovery from October 2011. It is estimated that the total volume of gas in place reaches now about 850 billion cubic meters (30 tcf).

RWE Dea AG has obtained a permit to develop a total of six natural gas fields in the Algerian Sahara. Algeria’s ALNAFT authority issued the permit to develop the Reggane, Azrafil South-East, Kahlouche, Kahlouche South, Tiouliline and Sali gas fields in the Algerian desert. The total capital spending for the development project is around 3 billion US dollars. The production period will be more than 25 years. The Field Development Plan foresees a constant production rate of 8 million cubic metres of gas per day over a production period of 12 years.

The Iraq Crude Oil Export Expansion Project has achieved its “first oil ready for start-up” milestone, Foster Wheeler has announced.. This, it said is a significant step towards Iraq’s planned increase in crude exports. This first phase of the expansion is intended to increase Iraq’s crude oil export capacity by 1.8m bpd of additional production. A further increase of another 1.8m bpd in Iraq’s export capacity is intended to be delivered after phase 2.

Total E&P Norge AS has awarded Kvaerner an EPSC (engineering, procurement, supply and construction) contract of close to NOK1.2bn for a 21.4kt steel jacket system for the Hild Field in the Norwegian North Sea. The contract will be executed by Kvaerner’s yard in Verdal. The project will reach its peak manpower of over 400 in Q3/13 and be delivered in early 2014. Verdal has five oil and gas jackets currently in execution for ConocoPhillips in Norway, BP in UK and and the recently awarded Luno jacket for Lundin Norway AS.

Foster Wheeler has been awarded a contract by Discovery Gas Transmission LLC to provide design, engineering and technical services for a junction platform, facilities and associated pipelines within the Discovery System at South Timbalier 283, in the Gulf of Mexico. The platform, in approximately 350 feet of water, will be a four-pile structure with a two-level deck. It will be designed as an unmanned structure with a control system designed to shut down the facility in the event of an upset condition. The new infrastructure will enable the existing Discovery pipeline to operate at a higher pressure, both before and after the connection of the new Keathley Canyon pipeline.

Sira Consulting Ltd is to provide Premier Oil plc with a comprehensive range of compliance services with respect to ATEX 137 & DSEAR. As part of its compliance procedures, Premier identified that a review of the hazardous area drawings for Balmoral FPV was necessary, with a competent third party organization required to assist Premier with its responsibilities under ATEX 137 / DSEAR. Sira’s scope is to analyse and classify the platform and to prepare a report and updated drawings to guide the selection and installation of equipment to be used safely in that environment. The contract is anticipated to take 16 weeks commencing Jan 2012.

Centrica plc, the parent company of British Gas, has reached an agreement with ConocoPhillips to acquire its non-operated interests in the gas and oil producing Statfjord field and associated satellites for a total cash consideration of £142m, including £66m attributable to historic tax allowances.

AMEC has a £10m contract to provide project services to BP for the Kinneil enhanced gas separation project, Grangemouth, Scotland. AMEC will help deliver mechanical, piping, electrical and instrumentation services, as well as construction and project management. The project is scheduled for mid-2013 and will create 120 construction jobs in the local area. The Kinneil Terminal stabilises crude oil from the North Sea Forties Field and processes and treats natural gas liquids from the St Fergus gas terminals. This latest project will enable it to process unstabilised crude oil, which has a high gas-to-oil ratio.

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