UK-based services firm Petrofac has received a “provisional letter of award” for a $600mn EPC contract with Algerian state firm Sonatrach. Work on “EPC-1” of the “Tinhert Field Development Project” involves debottlenecking the existing Ohanet gas processing plant with “a new inlet separation and compression center” and building “a pipeline network of approximately 400km to connect 36 wells, along with commissioning, start-up and performance testing of facilities.”

Ohanet is an ageing field in Algeria’s Illizi basin near the Libyan border some 1,000km southeast of Algiers. Declining output both here and at the Alrar field 80km to the east has left both fields’ processing facilities underutilized: the Tinhert project involves tying in peripheral fields to backfill capacity. (CONTINUED - 394 WORDS)