Dolphin chairman Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahayan described the event as an "historic" achievement and "highly important".

"The entire Dolphin value chain is now functioning, as we have long envisaged and planned. We are therefore managing and supplying our own gas to our contracted customers, controlling every stage of the process," he said.

"The next challenge is to carefully ramp up our production, until we reach targeted pipeline throughput of 2 billion standard cubic feet per day in early 2008."

Dolphin