Mega Progress
PDO’s two mega projects at Rabab Harweel (RHIP) and Yibal Khuff (YK) will deliver a major boost to gas production when they come on stream. Great efforts have been devoted to maximising In-Country Value in both through the deployment of skilled Omanis, such as engineers and hundreds of 6G welders trained through the National Objectives programme, and the procurement of locally sourced materials.
The RHIP is PDO’s largest ever capital investment project and gas will account for 80% of its production, providing a sustained power supply for homes and industrial development and the biggest reserve add of more than 500 million barrels of oil equivalent in the Company’s history. It also maintains the production plateau at the existing Harweel 2AB facility by miscible gas injection.
It has already created a huge number of jobs and development opportunities for PDO, local suppliers and contractors, as well as adding to PDO’s sour gas expertise, and will deliver a major revenue boost to Oman when it comes on stream next year.
The In-Country Value programme has already led to the procurement of goods and services worth more than $400 million locally. It has also entailed the main contractor Petrofac establishing an Oman engineering office and MAN Diesel and Turbo setting up a maintenance and repair workshop. Expertise and knowledge gained from RHIP is already being applied to other major PDO construction projects, such as YK, with staff gaining invaluable training and skills in areas such as engineering, procurement and project management.
Gas will account for around 20% of YK’s production, technically the most complex and second largest project undertaken by PDO to date.
The intricacy stems from its high sour oil and gas content versus export and environmental regulations which led to the use of sulphur recovery units for the first time in PDO history. The mega project is currently proceeding on schedule with construction soon to reach peak activity level, with a combined contractor workforce of some 6,500 dedicated to meeting the on stream target date of 2020.
Peak average production is targeted at 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil and six million cubic metres of gas per day. At the end of July, Petrofac successfully completed the Engineering and Procurement phase of the $3 billion scheme with a staggering equipment count of almost 950 and a concerted work effort of over 2.5 million manhours across a three-year period.
But only by visiting the YK construction site, which has a plot size exceeding 1.5 km2, can one get a sense of its enormous scale, and an appreciation of how far the project has come since its kick-off in June 2015. Massive quantities of concrete, material for storage tanks, and cabling for electrical and instrumentation works are being used. At the heart of the project is a central processing facility that rests on a mammoth steel structure.
An estimated 13,500 tonnes of structural steel will go into its construction. Installation of an 132 kilovolt overhead line is nearly complete, and construction of the power plant, three manifold stations, 109 kilometres of export/import pipelines and 78 km of flowlines is also well underway.
Already, more than half the 28 wells planned before start-up have been successfully drilled. A strict safety regime underpins both of the mega projects, which have clocked up millions of Lost Time Injury free manhours.
YK is the first PDO project to fully implement the HSE Frontline Leadership programme and 60 contractor and project supervisors have already successfully completed the training so far.