Qatif Field Development Inauguration to be Held Dec. 26

Saudi Aramco today announced that it will hold an inauguration ceremony on Dec. 26, 2004 for its newly-completed Qatif Producing Plants program.

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (PRWEB) December 20, 2004

Saudi Aramco today announced that it will hold an inauguration ceremony on Dec. 26, 2004 for its newly-completed Qatif Producing Plants program. The inauguration will celebrate the completion of the 800,000 barrel-per-day capacity field development program. In addition to the crude oil, the plants will provide 370 million standard cubic feet of associated gas daily.

Saudi Aramco President & CEO Abdallah S. Jum’ah noted that the Qatif Producing Plants program is one of the largest such increments ever built at one time and in one place in the oil industry. “We are very much aware of our unique role and responsibility in global markets, and the completion of an enormous, technically challenging project like Qatif ahead of schedule, under budget and with an exemplary record of safety and quality, is yet another example of Saudi Aramco’s ability to design and implement world-class, world-scale projects to ensure a reliable supply of energy to the world,” said Jum’ah. “In fact, such ’megaprojects’ have become one of our defining characteristics as a corporation, and have helped us to maintain our leadership position in the petroleum industry.”

The Qatif Producing Plants program was completed just two years after the August 2002 start of construction. The program, which required 1.8 million work hours to design and 70 million work hours to construct, brings with it the latest technological advancements to increase operational efficiency as well as environmental safety, from an onshore smokeless flare system to a new, 99 percent-efficiency sulfur recovery system at Berri Gas Plant.

To complete the program, about 15,000 laborers, craftsmen and professionals of various nationalities worked in different worksites, in and out of Kingdom.

The Qatif Field, located north of Saudi Aramco’s headquarters in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran, amounts to more than 195 square miles of area, including northern and southern dome structures. This onshore component of the project has the capacity to provide 500,000 bpd of Arabian Light Crude. The offshore Abu Sa’fah field – part of the Qatif Producing Plants program – contains an estimated 6.1 billion barrels of oil reserves below more than 65 square miles of seafloor. In addition to the dozens of wells that have been drilled both onshore and offshore, new gas-oil separation plants (GOSPs) have been built to accommodate the new production, and the existing Berri Gas Plant has been modernized so that it complies with the Kingdom’s sulfur-dioxide emission requirements.

The 300,000 bpd Arabian Medium production from Abu Sa‘fah is shipped through a new 42-inch submarine pipeline extending 60 km to the new onshore GOSP for further processing and stabilization. The Abu Sa‘fah stabilized crude is shipped to Ras Tanura Terminal for export.

The program also included building a network of pipelines linking facilities to each other and the Ras Tanura and Ju’aymah terminals, construction of the Administration and Workshop Complex and installing extensive communications networks.

The Qatif Producing Plants program marks another milestone among Saudi Aramco production facilities in that it is the first plant to be self-sufficient in providing its own power and steam from a turbine-powered, on-site cogeneration plant.

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