State-energy firm, Qatar Petroleum (QP) has awarded Japan’s JGC Corporation a major contract to build onshore facilities for its Barzan gas development at Ras Laffan in the north of the emirate, Dow Jones Newswires reports quoting Energy & Industry Minister, Abdullah al-Attiyah.

No details on the value of the contract were released.

The engineering and construction firm had been considered by industry sources to be in third place for the deal, behind a consortium of Japanese rival Chiyoda and South Korea’s Samsung Engineering, and also France’s Technip. Italy’s Saipem also submitted a bid in August for the estimated $1.7bn engineering, procurement and construction deal.

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

The award of 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 Saipem; all submitted technical bids in July and commercial bids in August for the Barzan offshore deal (MEED 26:11:10).

Barzan, a joint venture of QP and US oil major, ExxonMobil aims to produce 6.2 billion cubic feet a day (cf/d) of natural gas over three phases. The first phase is scheduled to come onstream in 2014 after being delayed in 2009 to benefit from falling construction costs. It involves the construction of two onshore gas processing trains with a combined capacity of 1.7 billion cf/d.