Saudi Aramco Awards $2 Billion Deal for Offshore Field Expansion

Saudi Aramco has awarded a $2-billion contract to Saipem as part of the capacity expansion of the huge Marjan offshore field in Saudi Arabia, the Italian engineering group said in a statement.

The new contract is part of an existing long-term agreement between Saipem and the world’s largest oil company.

Saipem’s scope of work involves the engineering, procurement, construction and installation of wellhead platforms’ topsides, wellhead platforms’ jackets, tie-in platform jacket and topside, rigid flowlines, submarine composite cables, and fiber optic cables.

This is the second contract the Italian group has won with Saudi Aramco this month.

In early September, Saipem was awarded two contracts worth a total of $1 billion to install jackets, Production Deck Modules, pipelines, and subsea power cables at the Marjan, Zuluf, and Safaniyah oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

Aramco was instructed early this year by the Kingdom’s leadership to stop work on expanding its maximum sustainable capacity to 13 million barrels per day (bpd), instead keeping it at 12 million bpd.

Despite the reversal of the capacity increase policy, Saudi Aramco continues work to expand crude capacity production at several fields, including the Marjan, Berri, Dammam, and Zuluf crude increment projects.

In its half-year report last month, Saudi Aramco said that it continues to work on projects to maintain its 12 million bpd maximum sustainable capacity and preserve operational flexibility.

The Dammam development project, which is expected to add crude oil production of 25,000 bpd later this year and 50,000 bpd in 2027, progressed construction. The Marjan and Berri crude oil increments, which are expected to add production capacity of 300,000 bpd and 250,000 bpd, respectively, by 2025, continued with procurement and construction activities. Finally, the Zuluf crude oil increment, which is expected to provide a central facility to process a total of 600,000 bpd of crude oil from the Zuluf field by 2026, moved forward with engineering, procurement, and construction activities.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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