Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has signed contracts worth a total of $2.3bn for the construction of three gathering centres in its North Kuwait Operations Zone.

The packages and the firms that won them are:

·  Gathering Centre 29 – Petrofac (UK), KD194.2m ($689m)

·  Gathering Centre 30 – Larsen & Toubro (India), KD239.7m

·  Gathering Centre 31 – Dodsal Group (UAE-based), KD228.1m

During the signing ceremony, KOC CEO Hashem Sayed Hashem said the projects were critical to boosting production capacity in North Kuwait.

Industry sources told MEED the firms had been informed of their selection in July.

Kuwait’s oil fields are connected to 26 gathering centres, which serve as a collection location for crude 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 b/d of water and 240 million cubic feet a day (cf/d) of associated gas. KOC expects the main scheme to be competed in December 2018.

The contract for front-end engineering and design (feed) work 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 scheme.