Iraq’s Basra Gas Company (BGC) is delaying the invitation to bid on the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for its $500m liquefied natural gas (LNG) production train and export facility until at least 2020.

“Design work has been completed, but we are not planning to tender the project until at least 2020, maybe 2022,” Ali Khader al-Saady, the director general of Iraq’s state-owned South Oil Company (SOC), told MEED on the sidelines of a conference in Turkey.

“This project is being delayed due to the high demand for dry gas within Iraq. We do not have the spare capacity to export at the moment.”

Basra Gas Company (BGC) is a joint venture between SOC, the Anglo-Dutch Shell Group and Japan’s Mitsubishi.

The LNG production train and export facility is part of the South Gas Utilisation Project, a $17.2bn scheme to capture and utilise flared gas from a number of fields across the south of Iraq. 

The first phase of the rehabilitation project will capture and dehydrate gas from the compressor stations at the West Qurna-1 and 2 fields, where about 200 million cubic feet a day (cf/d) of associated gas is currently flared.