Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE), has been awarded a contract to work on Saudi Arabia’s Marjan oilfield, Saudi Aramco’s largest upstream project of 2018.
BHGE, headquartered in Houston, Texas (US) will deliver drilling, coiled tubing, and drilling fluids engineering services for the project.
As part of the contract’s terms, BHGE will begin work on the Marjan oilfield expansion project this month, with its drilling services due to include logging-while-drilling, reservoir navigation, and rotary steerable services.
Additional details about Marjan’s expected capacity boost were not revealed in the statement shared by Aramco on 4 September, 2018, but Lorenzo Simonelli, chairman, president, and chief executive officer at BHGE, said the oilfield already consists of “a significant number of wells”.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Y Al Qahtani, senior vice president of Upstream at Saudi Aramco, described the Marjan oilfield as one of 2018’s upstream developments that “will contribute to the kingdom’s oil production strengths, helping maintain capacity and meet domestic and global demand”.
The Marjan oilfield expansion is described by Aramco as being “the first of three major offshore expansions in Saudi Arabia”, and follows the state-held global oil giant’s recent prequalification of six bidders to construct its $6bn (SAR22.5bn) Berri Offshore Oilfield Increment Programme project.
Details of the six pre-qualified engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) firms have not been publicised, but this May, Scottish news outlet NewsBase reported that the Berri contract was “expected to be the largest job tendered this year among the five signatories of Aramco’s so-called long-term agreements (LTAs)”.
This group, according to the report, includes the US’s Dynamic Industries and McDermott; India’s Larsen & Toubro (L&T); Oslo-listed Subsea-7; the UAE’s National Petroleum Construction; and Italy’s Saipem. Read more about the Berri project here.
