The stations are used to gather, treat and then distribute gas to the state’s refineries for processing.

The plants will have a similar size and configuration to station 160 in the southeast, which was recently awarded to Italy’s Snamprogetti in a contract worth $650m. Station 160 will have two identical single-stage compression trains, delivering 249 million cubic feet a day of sour gas (MEED 29:5:08).

One of the new stations, 171, will serve fields in western Kuwait. The other, 132, will be built in the north. The total cost of the plants is set to exceed $1bn, and the tenders are due to be issued by the end of the year.

Before then, KOC is expected to issue the long-awaited engineering, procurement and construction tender for gathering centre 16, which is designed to gather and distribute oil collected from flowlines in the oil fields. It will have crude handling capacity of 100,000 barrels a day (b/d).

Centre 16 was due to be tendered earlier this year, but is understood to have been held up by delays in the front-end engineering and design process. Last year, South Korea’s SK Engineering & Construction won a $666m contract to build the 165,000-b/d gathering centre 24 (MEED 29:3:08).

KOC plans to spend $26bn on Kuwait’s upstream sector over the next 13 years as it aims to reach a 4 million-b/d production target by 2020.