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Qatar is home to GE Oil & Gas’ Middle Eastern HQ. Mohammad Ayoub, regional general manager explains how 2009 worked to Qatar’s advantage
With years of success in the Qatar market, GE’s boldly branded office building in central Doha is home to the company’s wide range of businesses from energy, water technologies and security to aviation and healthcare across the Middle East. This flagship corporate facility is in addition to the major investment in a GE Oil & Gas service workshop in Ras Laffan.
Since March 2007 the company’s regional energy business has been under the stewardship of Mohammad Ayoub, regional general manager for GE Oil & Gas, and has delivered huge growth, helped along by the colossal gas projects for Qatargas and Ras Gas.
“Qatar has been a real success story for us. It’s become a benchmark within GE Oil & Gas and when we look at moving into new areas we benchmark that against the Qatar experience we have had.”
Despite the tight environment in 2009, Ayoub says GE Oil & Gas has bucked the over-riding trends, and secured substantial business growth.
“In 2009 business for new projects was almost 300% what we did in 2008, and for the overall business group, including services, business was probably double, so it’s been a great year for us.”
GE Oil & Gas supplied the gas turbine-driven compression strings with low emissions capability for much of the LNG refrigeration service, as well as the gas compression units along the Qatargas and Rasgas trains.
In September this year Qatar inaugurated Train 5 of the Qatargas II project, marking the halfway point for its giant gas export infrastructure plans. Much of the big ticket items surrounding the Qataragas and Rasgas projects are in place today, but Ayoub says the business pipeline in Qatar is far from dry. “Now that the principal infrastructure is in place we are moving to the second phase of our operations in Qatar,” explains Ayoub. “We have been very active partners on the major LNG projects going on here, mainly supplying gas compression units for the liquefaction trains, which are rated for an annual capacity of approximately 7.8 million tonnes. At the same time we built our Qatar service centre, which is now fully operational.”
The service centre is located in Ras Laffan, near the major receiving terminals for the gas produced at the giant North Field. When there is scheduled maintenance the service shop is nearby to minimise the downtime and ensure a quick intervention. In November it was announced that GE Oil & Gas’ PII Pipeline Solutions business had been awarded a multi-million dollar, six-year contract to supply Qatargas with advanced pipeline integrity management services to enhance the monitoring and maintenance of the company’s liquid natural gas (LNG) network. Under the agreement GE Oil & Gas will build and deploy a custom pipeline integrity management system (PIMS) to drive Qatargas’ overall integrity management processes.
In addition to the maintenance and service contracts GE has in place, the focus in Qatar will be shifting to the domestic infrastructure, explains Ayoub. “A good example of that is the Barzan gas processing project.”
The initial phase of the Barzan project will supply gas to meet Qatar’s infrastructure, industry growth and desalination demands. In February 2007 Qatar Petroleum and ExxonMobil agreed to form a joint venture to oversee the project development. According to Exxon figures, when fully operational, Barzan and Al Khaleej Gas (AKG) projects will produce almost 3 billion cubic feet per day of North Field natural gas to meet Qatar’s domestic gas needs.
Despite project revisions in Qatar, Ayoub says that the state energy companies have been quite shrewd operators through the past year.
“In Qatar, the crisis had certain advantages. There were too many projects being executed at the same time, and the opportunity to re-prioritise these was a timely one. Obviously Qatar stayed very active, and competition has become intense, but Qatar is playing that fact to its own advantage.”
Whilst the focus of the projects in Qatar is shifting to domestic infrastructure, Ayoub says other regional centres may dominate the GE project pipeline in the years ahead.
“Abu Dhabi has been very active – in fact the most active market in the Middle East in the last 12 months. The Integrated Gas Development network mega-project is huge, and there is the Shah Sour Gas project. That said, we see a lot of potential in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, so as a regional hub Qatar is still a great fit for us.”
