A consortium of Japan’s Chiyoda Corporation and South Korea’s Samsung Engineering is the frontrunner to win a major contract to build onshore facilities for Qatar’s Barzan gas development at Ras Laffan in the north of the emirate.

State-run energy firm Qatar Petroleum (QP) and its joint venture partner US oil major ExxonMobil held a series of post-bid meetings with contractors from 22 November following commercial submissions for the onshore scheme on 5 November. No official announcement has been made by QP, but the selection of Chiyoda and Samsung is all but a formality now, sources close to the scheme tell MEED.

Technical bids were submitted by four groups in August for the estimated $1.7bn engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) deal, including:

• Technip (France)
• Saipem (Italy)
• Chiyoda Corporation and Samsung Engineering
• JGC (Japan)

Chiyoda was selected for the front-end engineering and design (Feed) contract in May 2008.

The onshore deal follows QP’s selection of South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) for the offshore portion of the scheme, estimated at $800m. Four firms; HHI, Jebel Ali-based J Ray McDermott, the UAE’s National Petroleum Construction Company and Italy’s Saipem; all submitted technical bids in July and commercial bids in August for the Barzan offshore deal (MEED 26:11:10).

The project aims to produce 6.2 billion cubic feet a day (cf/d) over three phases to meet the Qatar’s growing domestic natural gas requirements. Barzan’s first phase is scheduled to come onstream in 2014 after having been delayed in 2009 to capture falling construction costs. It involves the construction of two onshore gas processing trains with a combined capacity of 1.7 billion cf/d.

It is unclear when the second phase will be launched. Qatar has imposed a moratorium on further upstream development of the field since 2005 until at least 2015 when technical studies of reservoir depletion are expected to be completed.  

QP could not be reached for a comment at the time of press.