Jordan approves region’s first shale oil-fired power plant

17 June 2013

Proposed plant will have a capacity of 500MW

The local/Estonian Enefit Jordan has received approval to build the region’s first shale-oil fired plant.

Jordan’s Environment Ministry approved the plans for the shale oil-fired plant following the review of a detailed third party environmental impact assessment (EIA) submitted by Enefit. The company had been working on the EIA for two years.

The proposed shale oil-fired plant is planned to have a capacity of about 500MW and is scheduled to be operational by 2017. The project is expected to reduce the kingdom’s expenditure on power generation by more than JD350m ($494m) a year. The client for the power scheme is the Attarat Power Company (APCO), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Enefit Jordan.

Apco received bids from six groups in April for the contract to build the plant. The bidders were:

  • Alstom (France)/Daewoo E&C (South Korea)
  • Hyundai E&C (South Korea)/LG International (South Korea)
  • Samsung Engineering (South Korea)
  • Posco (South Korea) /Daewoo International (South Korea)
  • China Machinery Engineering Corporation (China)
  • Guangdong Power (China)

Jordan is almost entirely dependent on energy imports, and the rise in oil prices in the past three years has put a lot of pressure on Amman’s budget. The impact was magnified as the Arab spring disrupted cheap gas imports, which forced the kingdom to switch to more expensive oil to provide power generation. Foreign oil imports currently account for an estimated 25 per cent of the kingdom’s gross domestic product.

In an effort to reduce its dependence on other countries, Jordan is exploring its shale oil and gas reserves. Jordan is believed to have the fourth largest oil shale resources in the world, behind the US, China and Russia, with an estimated 90 billion-100 billion barrels of oil in its shale deposits.

In September 2012, Jordan’s Energy & Mineral Resources Ministry signed an agreement with Canadian Global Oil Shale Holdings (GOSH) to assess oil shale resources in the south of the kingdom. GOSH will study the economic feasibility of an oil shale project in the Attarat Um Ghudran and Isphere al-Mahatain areas in central and southern Jordan. The two-year agreement also covers exploration across a total of 221.3 square kilometres.

The government has set a target of supplying 14 per cent of its energy needs from shale deposits by 2020.

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