The Subsea Integration Alliance (SIA) has been given the green light to push ahead with front-end engineering and design work on Morocco's first offshore project that could exploit some 2 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Chariot’s Anchois asset lies in the Lixus licence and will be tapped via a few subsea wells linked directly by pipeline to a new, onshore central processing facility (CPF), with gas sold domestically and — potentially — to Spain via the Maghreb-Europe pipeline.

First gas from a project that could cost $500 million is expected as early as 2024, with an initial flow rate of about 40 million cubic feet per day, but if further exploration in the immediate vicinity of Anchois is successful, then this volume could be expanded

The Schlumberger-Subsea 7 SIA partnership will handle FEED studies on the project off the Morocco’s Atlantic coast, having earlier been selected as the London-listed...