Canada’s SNC Lavalin has emerged as the frontrunner for an estimated $550m water injection contract at the Wara oil formation in the southeast of Kuwait after submitting the lowest bid in a 5 April bid round.

SNC Lavalin submitted a price of KD150m ($542m) beating rival proposals from six other international engineering and construction firms after two delays from the original 13 March deadline, not as reported by MEED on 8 April.

The bidding firms are:

• SNC Lavalin KD150m
• GS Engineering & Construction (South Korea) KD151m
• Daelim Corporation (South Korea) KD160m
• Samsung Engineering (South Korea) KD170m
• Petrofac (UK) KD180m
• Hyundai Engineering & Construction (South Korea) KD196m
• Saipem (Italy) KD198m)

A total of 30 companies were prequalified for the project to provide pressure support for the Wara formation in the Burgan oil field.

The client, state-upstream operator, Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) plans to build water collection, treatment and injection facilities to pump as much as 1 million barrels a day (b/d) of water into the Wara formation to maintain pressure and production levels at the field by the middle of 2014 (MEED 4:3:11).

This will comprise 10 water treatment units, 60 pumps and up to 700 kilometres of pipelines, with diameters varying from 6-30 inches. It will also include a tank farm with 20 tanks capable of holding between 10,000 to 240,000 barrels.

The greater Burgan area contains about 70 billion barrels of oil, making it the second-largest oilfield in the world and has been in operation for about 60 years. However, production has fallen to 1.7 million b/d from a peak of 2.4 million b/d in 1972 and without action some analysts believe this could fall to as low as 1.5 million b/d by 2020. In 2009, Kuwait total current production averaged 2.48 million b/d, according to UK oil major BP.