Qatargas has fired the starting gun on two substantial offshore engineering, procurement, construction and installation packages involving its giant North Field Expansion (NFE) project.

Project watchers said the Qatari state-owned giant recently sought interests from leading international players to participate in tendering exercises covering the offshore infrastructure required for this huge gas field development.

The first package includes at least eight new unmanned wellhead platform topsides, while the second one comprises more than 560 kilometres of subsea pipelines and 300 kilometres of subsea cables, industry sources said.

Some additional tower platform topsides could also be included in the first EPCI package, but this could not be confirmed by Upstream.

Tender packages for the two EPCI contracts are likely to be issued to shortlisted players by the end of this year, following the conclusion of the solicitation of interest (SoI) stage, one market watcher pointed out.

The two offshore jobs are understood to be a crucial element of the gas field expansion project that is believed to be worth billions of dollars.

Qatar Petroleum subsidiary Qatargas is carrying out the tender process for the mega expansion project on behalf of the Qatari state-controlled giant.

Those chasing the first package include McDermott International of the US, Italy’s Saipem, UK’s TechnipFMC and Singapore’s Sembcorp Marine.

Local fabrication yard Qatar Engineering & Construction Company (QCon) and Nakilat-Keppel Offshore & Marine (NKom) are also likely to be involved in the tender process for offshore platforms, but could align with one of the key EPCI players, sources said.

For the pipelines package, McDermott, Saipem, Oslo-listed Subsea 7 and TechnipFMC are thought to be among the offshore players that recently received SoI’s from Qatargas.

Qatar is swiftly progressing on the expansion of its liquefied natural gas export capacity to 110 million tonnes per annum from today's 77 million tpa.

McDermott is carrying out the front-end engineering and design work on the NFE offshore project that involves topsides for offshore platforms and subsea pipelines.

The US fabricator said earlier this year that it had landed the FEED award covering topsides and other facilities for NFE.

McDermott said “the FEED scope includes the design of four offshore trunk lines with intra-field pipelines, eight wellhead platforms and power and fiber optic (PFO) subsea cable rings.”

The US company is also working on the EPCI project involving multiple offshore jackets required for the NFE project.

Fabrication of the NFE jackets will be carried out at the company’s Batam, Indonesia facility, with project management and engineering to be done out of Doha.

Qatar is carrying out the tender process for several onshore as well as offshore projects involving the expansion of its giant North Field that are likely to be worth billions of dollars.

Qatar Petroleum has also initiated the tender process for onshore packages comprising the liquefaction and storage facilities required for the NFE expansion project, which together are expected to be valued upwards of $18 billion.

Qatar Petroleum earlier this year issued tender documents to three shortlisted consortia for work on the four 7.8 million tpa mega-trains for NFE.

The tenders were issued to a consortium of Japan’s Chiyoda and TechnipFMC, another grouping of Japan’s JGC and South Korean giant Hyundai Engineering & Construction, and a third group comprising Saipem, McDermott and Taiwan’s CTCI.

QP has also launched a separate tender for storage and loading facilities.

Contractors are also chasing some additional onshore packages that are a part of the giant NFE project.

Weekly

Qatargas gets the ball rolling at North Field