State downstream oil company Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) has issued a tender for a fifth gas train at Mina al-Ahmadi refinery with a bid deadline of 7 December 2014.

The new gas train has an estimated budget of $900m and will be designed to process associated gas and condensate from Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) gathering centres in southeast Kuwait and north Kuwait oil fields.

It will also be supplied with refinery gases from the acid gas removal plants at the two other refineries owned and operated by the KNPC: Shuaiba refinery and Mina Abdullah refinery.

The project was initially expected to be launched in early 2012, but the process was pushed back along with Kuwait’s other major downstream schemes, such as the $16bn Clean Fuels Project, the $15bn New Refinery Project and the $700m new sulphur handling facility. 

The new facility will include:

• Pre-treatment unit
• Natural gas liquid (NGL) recovery unit
• Fractionation column
• Product treatment unit
• Propane refrigeration unit
• Deep refrigeration unit
• Sour water stripper
• De-mineralised water plant
• Fuel gas treatment unit
• Utilities
• Tie-ins with existing facilities to increase the gas treating capacity.

KNPC has specified that the new gas liquefaction unit should have a design capacity of 805 million cubic feet a day (cf/d) of gas and 106.3 million barrels a day (b/d) of external condensate, in addition to the condensate produced in the NGL recovery section of the process. Product recoveries should be at least 75 per cent ethane, 97 per cent propane and 99 per cent butane.

Current and future non-associated gas from the Jurassic and Dorra gas fields will also be considered in the gas train’s design.