Aramco begins output from expanded gas plants

Al Khobar:  State oil company Saudi Aramco has brought online the expanded Juaymah and Hawiyah gas plants, sources said on Monday.

Aramco is focusing on meeting domestic gas demand after completing last year a crude expansion project to boost output capacity to 12.5 million barrels per day. Gas demand in Saudi Arabia is growing annually by 7 per cent as oil revenues fuel economic expansion.

Aramco aims to raise gas supplies 30 per cent to 8 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) in five years. It also sees its non-associated gas processing capacity rising to 9 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) by 2015, from 6.2 billion cfd, an Aramco executive said last year.

"The projects are finalized, mechanical completion is done," a source said. Aramco is boosting capacity at Juaymah by about 50 per cent to handle increased volumes of petrochemical feedstock ethane and light oils that form when gas is extracted, called natural gas liquids (NGLs).

The expansion at Juaymah will add 260,000 barrels per day (bpd) of additional splitting capacity to the gas plant, taking capacity there to 815,000 bpd. The increased ethane and NGL output comes from the expansion of the Hawiyah and Khursaniyah gas plants. The plant at Hawiyah will process an additional 800 million cfd of non-associated gas, raising the plant's capacity to 2.4 billion cfd.

Last month, Aramco started operating the Khursaniyah gas plant which would process 1 billion cfd of gas from 500,000 barrels per day.