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A senior official from hydrocarbons giant Saudi Aramco has said that the US$9 billion Manifa offshore oilfield will be brought on stream in 2013 as planned.
Reuters reported that Fahad al-Moosa, Aramco’s vice president of Northern Area Oil Operations, said that the 900,000 barrels per day (bpd) field would not be delayed and work on the project will continue as planned.
“Sometime in 2013, it is on schedule. We are working on the detailed design,” Moosa told reporters at a Bahrain energy conference.
The Manifa project will be Aramco’s largest offshore field when fully operational. As well as the 900,000 bpd of heavy crude, the field will also produce 120 million scfd of sour gas, 50,000 bpd of condensate, and 950,000 bpd of produced water.
The huge outlay is being spent on constructing a number of drilling islands, a central processing facility, a water injection system, downstream pipelines, and a massive 41km causeway that runs to shallow-water offshore platforms.
This will facilitate the easy transportation of goods and services both to and from the mainland. The nearby Khursaniyah Gas Plant is also being upgraded to cope with the additional gas from the project.
The field was delayed for two years after Aramco decided to concentrate on prioritising a number of gas projects to help meet soaring domestic demand for gas in the KSA.
