Saudi Aramco to tender 4-6 Marjan offshore contracts

State-run Saudi Aramco is looking to tender four to six offshore contracts for the Marjan oil field development project over the coming weeks, MEED reported on Tuesday, citing industry sources.

One source said that the packages are expected to be large even if they were divided into six, adding that they will include decks, jackets and pipelines.

“Aramco had been pushing to issue the ITBs [invitations to bid] before Ramadan. Now it seems like they could be delayed until after Ramadan,” the source noted.

Aramco has earlier announced a series of onshore and offshore packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as part of the Marjan Crude Increment Program.

MEED reported that the project’s prequalified bidders are from Aramco’s long-term agreement (LTA)-approved contractors, including Italy’s Saipem, India’s Larsen & Toubro Hydrocarbon Engineering, Saudi Arabia’s Dynamic Industries, US-based McDermott International, and UAE’s National Petroleum Construction Company.

The Marjan offshore field is located about 85 kilometers northeast of Aramco’s Tanajib oil complex in the Gulf, with a capacity to produce about 500,000 barrels a day of crude.

The megaproject includes new offshore facilities such as platforms and additional pipelines to link to a new gas facility in Tanajib on the Gulf coast, and further to the expanded natural gas liquid (NGL) facility in Khursaniyah, MEED added.

In February, Aramco awarded UK-based energy and engineering services firm Wood a contract to help the oil giant deliver Marjan oil field in the Eastern Province.