Last year Qatar’s oil shipments reached more than 14 destinations internationally, with its LNG exports amounting to 21% of the global market.

United Kingdom contractor, Wood Group, has landed a key contract with QatarEnergy to pursue ‘front-end engineering’ and design studies (FEED) on the country’s expanding development of its Bul Hanine and Maydan Mahzam offshore oil and gas fields.

Front-end engineering, also known as pre-project planning, is an engineering design approach implemented to control project expenses and thoroughly plan a project before a fix bid quote is submitted.

This has been disclosed by three people with direct knowledge of the development, as per Upstream’s reports, that the company was recently ‘awarded’ with the FEED contract.

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One source said the FEED work is prolonging and that it is likely to extend over a period of 20 to 22 months.

The Aberdeen-based company Wood has also carried out pre-FEED work on the ‘combined’ development that was granted by the Qatari oil giant in 2019. This had been done in an effort to find means of ramping up gas production and sustaining oil.

Its previous work included studies focussed around the expansion of existing offshore production stations of PS-2 and PS-3 and a series of wellhead platforms which are a type of oil platform that houses personnel and machineries to extract oil and natural gas through wells in the ocean bed. Other works entailed the studies of riser towers, multiple segments of offshore pipelines, and several other relevant offshore infrastructure.

QatarEnergy​ operates three offshore production stations through its PS-1, PS-2 and PS-3 fields. The three platforms produce crude oil, associated gas, and condensate.

Qatar’s oilfield expansion projects

According to data from S&P Global Platts Analytics, the Gulf nation was the world’s biggest LNG exporter in 2021, with oil supplies reaching 110.2 billion cubic metres (bcm). It was followed by Australia attaining 107.2 bcm levels.

The country’s North Field lies off the northeast shore of the Qatar peninsula and is one of the biggest single non-associated natural gas fields in the world.

Under QatarEnergy, the Gulf country is moving towards dominating the global production of LNG through its mega North Field Expansion project, the biggest in the world.

Through the project, QatarEnergy is set to become the largest provider of natural gas by 2030.

The multi-billion plan is the largest of its kind, and seeks to boost Qatar’s annual LNG production capacity from 77 million metric tonnes to 126 million tonnes by 2027, the Amir announced during the 6th Gas Exporting Countries Forum Summit in February.

In November 2021, QatarEnergy also ordered six LNG carriers from Korean shipyards as part of its plans to meet the future LNG carrier requirements.

The previously-delayed Barzan gas plant in the Gulf country’s onshore oil and gas industry was inaugurated by the Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani in March. It began operations to produce and process natural gas from the North Field. The gas plant will meet Qatar’s high domestic energy generation demands and water desalination.

The sector is set to produce approximately 1.4 billion cubic feet of gas per day.