Hard at work: in Saudi Arabia
Aramco priming Nuayyim pumps
Saudi Arabia's 100,000 barrels per day Nuayyim oilfield should be ready to start production by the middle of June, according to reports.
The field is one of three Saudi schemes due for completion by the middle of this year to boost the country's oil production capacity to 12.5 million bpd. Nuayyim's oil will be Arab Extra Light crude, which is prized by refiners for the ease with which it can be transformed into transport fuels.
Most wells at Nuayyim were ready to pump and some were feeding crude into new infrastructure at the field, sources told Reuters.
State-run giant Saudi Aramco would send first oil into a plant to separate oil and gas at Nuayyim in the next couple of days, one source said.
It would take just over a month to fully test and start the separation plant, industry sources said.
"By 15 June the plant would be ready to produce oil," said one. "The project is at the pre-commissioning stage... everything is running as scheduled."
Aramco declined to comment on the start-up date.
First production from the field was delayed from the initial schedule of December 2008, in part due to glitches in supplies of equipment for the separation plant. Construction of the plant began in September 2007.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi said in March there were no customers for the oil that Nuayyim and Shaybah - another of the country's massive oilfield rehabiliatation projects would produce. He said then that both fields were ready to pump.
Saudi Arabia has cut output by around 2 million bpd since last summer to match a slide in global oil demand due to recession, leaving it with growing spare capacity.
Saudi output was just below 8 million bpd, Naimi said at the weekend.
If all the new projects were ready in June, the world's top oil exporter would have spare capacity of 4.5 million bpd, more than twice the 1.5 million to 2 million bpd cushion it likes to keep to meet any surprise global production outages.