Steam being generated by the ‘Miraah’ solar glasshouse plant in Oman will help Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) boost productivity of wells at its Amal oil field in the southern part of the sultanate.

“We are going to ramp up production [at the Amal onshore oil field] from 2,400 cubic metres a day [15,096 barrels a day (b/d)] to about 5,000 cubic metres a day [31,450 b/d], so almost doubling it in the next 4-5 years,” said PDO’s managing director Raoul Restucci.

“We have found additional reserves on the eastern side [of the Amal oil field] so there will be more and more expansion of this project,” Restucci told MEED.

Currently four blocks of the Miraah project have come online, and have been supplying steam to PDO since November last year. The scheme has enabled the Omani oil major to perform thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to extract the heavy oil from the Amal’s reservoirs. US technology firm Glasspoint Solar is constructing the plant.

The four blocks have a total capacity of over 100 megawatt (MW) and will deliver 660 tonnes of steam per day to the nearby Amal field, providing significant savings of gas being previously solely used by PDO to produce steam for thermal EOR.

Glasspoint’s chief operating officer and acting CEO Ben Bierman told journalists during the official inauguration of the Miraah complex on 12 February that he expects construction of the next eight blocks to be completed by early-2019.

With 12 blocks ready and producing steam for Amal in a year’s time from now, the remaining 24 blocks of the planned 36 planned will be constructed as per the steam requirements of the PDO oil field, Bierman said.

“Pace of construction has picked up. The next eight blocks, which are twice the size of the current ones, will be finished in just over a year. We hope we can keep building faster and faster,” Bierman said. “The timing of the steam will depend on our partner PDO. We will keep constructing the modules as PDO needs more steam for the Amal field. We will keep on adding blocks to match the demand.”

When fully operational, Miraah will be a 1,021 MW solar plant generating an average of 6,000 tonnes of solar steam daily for enhanced oil recovery, dwarfing all other solar EOR installations.