August was a slow month for major contract awards with no new orders valued over $1bn.

The largest contract was a $831m deal secured by India’s Larsen & Toubro for an oil gathering centre in Kuwait. The award was one of three contracts totalling $2.3bn awarded by Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) for the construction of gathering centres in its North Kuwait Operations Zone.

The other contracts were a $689m deal won by the UK’s Petrofac and a $789m order secured by UAE-based Dodsal Group.

The projects are critical to boosting production capacity in north Kuwait as the 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 only other award worth more than $250m during August was won by India’s Nagarjuna Construction Company. The secured a $371.3m contract to build the second package of the Batinah Expressway project in Oman.

The contract is part of the new 265-kilometre-long Batinah Expressway, Oman’s biggest road scheme, will create the first dual four-lane motorway in the sultanate and will link Muscat to the new Sohar Port and the UAE border.