Samsung Engineering wins expansion deal for oil field

ALKHOBAR: South Korea’s Samsung Engineering has won a contract to expand gas-oil separation plants in Saudi Arabia’s Shaybah oil field for state oil giant Saudi Aramco, two industry sources said.
The contract is in addition to Samsung’s work on one of the construction packages of the $2.8 billion natural gas liquids (NGL) program for Aramco in the southeastern field. Shaybah is one of the biggest in the world’s top oil exporter, now with a capacity of 750,000 bpd.
Saudi Aramco and Samsung Engineering declined to comment on the division of work into out-of-kingdom (OOK) and in-kingdom (IK) operations.
Samsung has so far only signed the OOK deal.
Out-of-kingdom refers to overseas engineering and procurement while IK covers local procurement, field engineering and construction.
Aramco plans to increase light sour crude output from Shaybah and Khurais — by 550,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2016-2017, to rebalance its crude quality and extend the lifespan of mature fields.
Shaybah’s expansion to 1 million bpd would come first, by the end of 2016 or early 2017.
“There are two factors (for) increasing gas supplies from Shaybah- one is the steadily increasing gas-to-oil ratio which now requires additional gas processing capacity as well as the increase in oil production which will also add to the overall gas supplies,” said Sadad Al-Husseini, a former top executive at Aramco and now president of Husseini Energy, an independent consulting firm.
In 2011, Samsung won the NGL project at Shaybah, due online by end of 2014 and will help meet increasing demand for petrochemical feedstock by recovering NGL from the produced gas.
It will process 2.4 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) of low-sulphur sweet gas from the field and send on 264,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) of NGLs for processing at an associated processing plant, known as Juaymah.