Manifa Arabian Heavy Crude Project, Saudi Arabia

The Manifa Arabian heavy crude programme is an offshore oil production development project being undertaken by Saudi Aramco (the largest oil company by production in the world and headquartered in Dahran).

The project is part of the development of the Saudi oil fields, which are expected to see an increase in production from 11 million barrels a day at the current time to over 12.5 million barrels a day beyond 2010.

The Manifa project began planning in 2006 and the FEED (Front-End Engineering and Design) was completed in the third quarter of 2007 (Manifa was first discovered in 1957 and was developed but was then later mothballed because of the heavy quality of the crude).

The FEED and project management services contract was awarded to Foster Wheeler in November 2006. Foster Wheeler's remit is the FEED for the central processing facility, detail design, ordering of long lead equipment, coordination of the FEED development across the project including the offshore sections and development of the bid package for the engineering, procurement and construction stage.

The first construction contract was signed in late 2007 and construction will begin in the first quarter of 2008 with a scheduled completion date in June 2011. The investment into the project is around $10bn.

THE MANIFA PROJECT

The project involves the development of the Manifa offshore oil field and the construction and expansion of new processing infrastructure to handle an additional 900,000bpd of Arabian heavy crude. There will also be production of sour gas, gas condensate (condensate production is estimated at 50,000bpd) and water.

The processing infrastructure will include a gas-oil separation facility, crude stabilisation units and also additional separators. The project will also involve the expansion of the Khursaniyah gas facility for the sour gas processing requirements (estimated at 120 million cubic feet a day).

Also included in the project is the construction of four on- and offshore pipeline networks and a water supply system. The water supply system is for Aramco to inject around 1.35 million barrels of acquifer water into the oil reservoir a day to maintain the required pressure for optimum crude oil production.

Much of the heavy oil will be shipped to a new refinery which will be built at Yanbu on the Red Sea (a joint venture of Saudi Aramco and Conoco Philips). The refinery is intended to produce ultra-low sulphur oil for the US market.

CONTRACTS AWARDED

In January 2008 a contract worth $1bn will be awarded to the Belgian dredging contractor Jan de Nul for work on the offshore section of the Manifa project.

Jan de Nul will work to build drilling islands (25 drilling production islands and two water injection islands) and a causeway to provide access for the drilling of production wells for the Manifa fields.

The causeway will be 41km long is due to be completed by December 2009. The structure will provide a link from the coastal areas to the offshore platforms, which are in shallow water. Construction work will also include a 2.4km-long bridge at the southern end of the main causeway and five 180m bridges along with eight banks of culverts spaced out along the causeway.

Dredging work will also give access channels for vessels, cables and subsea pipelines. There will be two berthing areas on the main causeway (north and south) with roll-on roll-off facilities for Saudi Aramco vessels.

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