Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has selected the UK’s Petrofac, the local Dodsal Group and India’s Larsen & Toubro to construct three major gathering centre projects in North Kuwait, according to officials with knowledge of the tendering process.

The combined value of the contracts will be worth more than $2.3bn and the three successful contractors are:

• Gathering Centre 29 – Petrofac, KD194.2m ($689m)
• Gathering Centre 30 – Larsen & Toubro, KD239.7m
• Gathering Centre 31 – Dodsal Group, KD228.1m

The contracts are yet to be officially announced or appear on Kuwait’s Central Tenders Committee website, but all three companies have been informed of their selection.

“The contractors have been informed and are expected to sign the contracts after Ramadan [July],” says a source familiar with the project.

Meed reported on 12 February that Dodsal had submitted the lowest prices for all three tenders. Contractor sources indicated that the KOC was unlikely to award all three projects to a single firm.

Kuwait’s oil fields are connected to 26 gathering centres, which serve as a collection location for crude oil produced at several wells connected by flowlines, providing initial treatment through the separation of associated gas and removing salt.

The three new gathering centres are needed as part of KOC’s long-term strategy to develop the oil fields of North Kuwait. KOC is planning to increase oil production from 760,000 barrels a day (b/d) to 1 million b/d by 2015 and maintain the production rate for at least five years.

Each gathering centre will be designed to handle up to 100,000 b/d of oil, 240,000 barrels of water a day and 240 million cubic feet a day (cf/d) of associated gas. KOC expects the main project to be competed in December 2018.

The contract for front-end engineering and design (feed) on the project was won by UK engineering consultancy AMEC and was executed from its London office. AMEC is also project management consultant (PMC) on the project.

The selection of Larsen & Toubro to build Gathering Centre 30 comes as it was announced as the low bidder in another Kuwait-based project. The Indian firm has bid $814m for a contract to construct 250 kilometres of crude feed pipelines that will serve the new 615,000 b/d refinery planned at Al-Zour in southern Kuwait.