The contract, due to be awarded in March, is expected to be worth just over $100 million. The client is the Rome office of Technip-Coflexip, which signed in late January the $675 million engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for Qatar's first gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant (MEED 31:3:03; 10:1:03).

The Al-Hajri/Astaldi joint venture will be responsible for carrying out the entire construction package, undertaking civil, mechanical, electrical and instrumentation works.

Technip-Coflexip priced the EPC package without a nominated subcontractor and selected the venture after bids were submitted by international and regional contractors.

The EPC is due to take 33 months to complete. It will involve the construction of a 34,000-barrel-a-day (b/d) GTL plant. The plant's front-end engineering and design (FEED) package was prepared by the UK's Foster Wheeler Energy.

The client is Oryx GTL,a 51:49 joint venture between Qatar Petroleum and South Africa's Sasol.

The plant will require 330 million cubic feet a day of North field gas feedstock to produce 24,000 b/d of diesel, 9,000 b/d of naphtha and 1,000 b/d of liquefied petroleum gas.