Saudi Aramco Khurais Mega Project, Khurais, Saudi Arabia

The Khurais oilfield development is the largest of several Saudi Aramco projects intended to boost the production capacity of Saudi Arabia's oilfields from 11.3 million bpd to 12.5 million bpd by 2009.

The Khurais project as a whole covers three oil fields: Khurais, Abu Jifan and Mazalij. The Khurais field, with an area of 2,890km² and 127km long, located about 250km southwest of Dhahran and 300km north southeast of Riyadh, is the biggest in the project. Abu Jifan covers 520km² southwest of Khurais and Mazalij covers 1,630km² southeast of Abu Jifan.

In 2009, the project is expected to add 1.2 million bpd of high-quality Arabian light crude to Saudi Arabia's export capacity. The Khurais program will also increase the capacity of the Qurayyah seawater injection system by 4.5 million bpd of treated water for injection at Khurais and South Ghawar fields. The total project cost is estimated to be about $3bn.

The drilling was completed in February 2009, ten months ahead of the actually scheduled three year duration. Production at the oil field began in June.

Quality of the field

Khurais is located on a large structural trend to the west of, and parallel to, the Ghawar trend.

Because of this superficial resemblance to Ghawar, there were very high hopes that Khurais would be comparably large.

It turned out that the reservoir at Khurais was much smaller and not as high quality as Ghawar, though it is still the largest of the proposed projects. Variable reservoir quality had also been a problem at Khurais. Pilot-scale production at Khurais began in 1963, but the field was never fully developed. It produces Arab light crude.

Project intentions

There are four existing Gas / Oil Separation Plants (GOSPs) in operation in the Khurais field and one GOSP in each of the two other fields. Currently, the combined production capacity is 300,000bpd. The scope of the new construction program will extend across Saudi Arabia, involving major construction at six separate locations and the development of 10 million m² of land.

At the forefront of the program will be the Khurais central processing facility, providing crude processing and stabilisation facilities.

That will be supported by new infrastructure including new wells and trunklines, new seawater supply and injection lines, a residential and industrial complex, and new product lines.

In addition to the 1.2 million bpd of Arabian light crude blend that will be produced and delivered through the east / west pipeline, the program will produce 315 million scfd of sour gas for Shedgum Gas Plant and 70,000bpd of Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) for Yanbu Gas Plant.

Contractors

SNC-Lavalin and Saipem S.A., in a joint venture were awarded a turnkey contract by Saudi Aramco to design and build the seawater injection plants for the Khurais oil field development program in Saudi Arabia in early 2006. The four injection plants have a capacity of injecting over four million barrels of treated seawater per day.

The contract commenced on a reimbursable basis converting to a fixed price lump sum turnkey contract once the project's details were further defined.

Foster Wheeler Energy Limited was awarded a front-end engineering and project management services contract by Saudi Aramco for the Khurais full-field development in Saudi Arabia in July 2005.

The scope of work included a grassroots central processing facility at Khurais, upgrade of support facilities at the Ju'aymah gas plant, inter-field pipelines, utilities and product handling / storage / infrastructure and support facilities.

Foster Wheeler validated the work undertaken and provided overall project management and engineering services for the central processing facility, including certain procurement and construction management services.

Jacobs Engineering with SNC Lavalin and the local Saudi Consulting Services (SaudConsult) carried out the FEED (Front End Engineering Design) package on the expansion of Shaybah. The Shaybah expansion involved installation of new wet crude handling facilities, dehydration and desalter units, a GOSP, pipelines and gas reinjection facilities.

Oilfield services

Halliburton was awarded the oilfield services component of the Khurais mega project in early 2006. This three-year contract included a full range of Halliburton's integrated services and technologies.

The project used 12 rigs to support the drilling and completion of more than 310 wells. Development of this project was a key contributor to Saudi Aramco's plan of increasing production capacity.