There were five contract awards in February 2014, which surpassed a value of $1bn. The largest deals came from on project, the Clean Fuels Project (CFP) in Kuwait.

Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) awarded three contracts worth a total sum of almost $12bn on 11 February. The three EPC contracts involve upgrade and expansion work on refineries in Mina al-Ahmadi and Mina Abdullah. The upgrade and expansion work is expected to increase the combined capacity of the refineries to 800,000 barrels a day (b/d) from 736,000 b/d currently.

Contracts and the winning consortiums were:

• Mina al-Ahmadi refinery – $4.8bn: JGC Corporation/SK Engineering & Construction (South Korea)/GS Engineering & Construction (South Korea)
• Mina Abdullah 1 refinery – $3.7bn: Petrofac/Samsung Engineering (South Korea)/CB&I Lummus (US)
• Mina Abdullah 2 refinery – $3.4bn: Fluor Corporation/Hyundai Heavy Industries (South Korea)/Daewoo Engineering & Construction (South Korea)

The next largest contract came from the power sector in Algeria, where South Korea’s Samsung C&T  won a $1.37bn contract for two combined cycle power plants in Algeria.  The client for the project is Sonelgaz Electricity Production Company. The power plants will be built in Mostaganem and Nama under an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) agreement. The award is part of a larger scheme by the Algerian government to build a total of six new combined-cycle power plants.

The only other contract valued at over $1bn was awarded by the UK-based energy group BP awarded the first major construction contract on its Khazzan tight gas development in Oman. A consortium of the UK’s Petrofac and the Athens-based Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) was awarded a $1.2bn EPC deal on the project’s central processing facility (CPF), according to sources close to the bidding process.

The CPF, which will be built at Block 61 in west-central Oman, will have the capacity to produce 1 billion cubic feet a day (cf/d) of sales gas sourced from the Khazzan field.

BP is expected to award several more major EPC packages later this year including gas production well site facilities, a gas gathering pipeline system, a gas export pipeline, a condensate export pipeline, water disposal facilities and the operating base and residential complex.