Offshore Gas Program Acceleration (Karan Gas Program)

Abstract The Karan Gas Program successfully completed Saudi Aramco's first offshore nonassociated gas development with a capital budget of US$ multibillion, and achieved record early gas in 2 years and 3 months with full production in 3 years and 4 months. The Karan gas field is located approximately 110 km offshore in Saudi Arabian Gulf territorial waters. It was discovered in 2007 and has a production capacity of 1,800 million standard cubic feet per day (MMscfd) of natural gas. The Karan field development schedule was accelerated to meet the increased demand from the energy sector for Saudi Arabian gas. The proposed OTC 2015 paper will focus on the project management aspects of the program and include a full field development case study of the field expansion to increase capacity and sustain production. The paper and presentation will elaborate on accelerated offshore gas program development methodologies that resulted in gas production from wells to the domestic consumers in a record timeframe. The program was executed under four subprojects that were developed concurrently as follows: Karan Gas Facilities: Responsible for providing the primary gas processing facilities.Karan Offshore Facilities: Responsible for fabricating and installing production and tie-in platforms.Karan Gas Pipelines: Responsible for linking the offshore and onshore elements. The project fabricated and installed flowlines from each production well to the tie-in well and 110 kilometers of 38 in. pipe to the onshore producing facility.Manifa Gas Facilities: Responsible for installing processing facilities for associated sour gas and hydrocarbon condensate from the Manifa offshore oil field.