Bids due for Umm al-Qaiwain gas scheme

11 January 2002

Three international companies have been prequalified to submit bids by 24 February for an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to build natural gas-processing facilities at Umm al-Qaiwain. The prospective bidders are the UK's KCC, US-based Petrofac International and Propac of Canada. Technip Abu Dhabi, part of France's Technip, carried out the front-end engineering and design (FEED) for the project (MEED 7:9:01).

The 14-month contract, estimated to be worth $110 million-120 million, will be carried out in two phases. The first will cover the construction of a 150 million-cubic-feet-a-day (cf/d) gas-processing and sweetening plant, test separators, slug catchers, storage works and civil works for a control system. The capacity of the processing plant is expected to be increased to 300 million cf/d at a later stage.

The plant's feedstock will be sourced from an offshore discovery, located about 23 kilometres from the mainland. Under the second phase, a platform will be installed, linked to the mainland by a 14-inch, 30-kilometre pipeline. The work also includes the construction of a 12-inch export pipeline from the gas-processing plant to an existing natural gas distribution trunkline operated by the local Emarat.

The client is Atlantis Holdings Norway, with Abu Dhabi-based UAE Offsets Group (UOG). Feedstock for the proposed plant will be supplied by Atlantis, which completed in November the testing of an exploratory offshore gas well near Umm al-Qaiwain.

The drilling and development of the well, known as Umm al-Qaiwain-3, comes under a concession agreement signed between Atlantis and the government of Umm al-Qaiwain (MEED 11:5:01).

The well, drilled to a depth of 16,000 feet, is estimated to have recoverable reserves of up to 500,000 million cubic feet of gas and has a capacity to produce about 10 barrels of condensates for every million cubic feet of lean gas.

Gas from the concession will be used for power generation and water desalination in the northern emirates. Atlantis has signed an agreement with UOG for the sale of gas from Umm al-Qaiwain. The other user may be the Federal & Electricity Authority, which operates power stations in the northern emirates using diesel as feedstock.

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