RE: Char15 Apr 2023 20:37
Chariot poised to receive bids on debut Moroccan offshore gas project
Subsea and onshore facilities are needed by Chariot as critical engineering studies wrap up for Anchois
At least two contractors will shortly submit commercial offers to Chariot Energy to fabricate the subsea and onshore facilities for its 640 billion cubic foot Anchois gas project offshore Morocco — the country’s first such development.
Anchois lies in the Lixus licence and will be tapped via subsea wells linked directly by pipeline to a new onshore central processing facility (CPF), with gas sold domestically as feedstock for power stations and, potentially, for export to Spain via the Maghreb-Europe pipeline.
In its initial phase, subsea wells will send gas to a CPF designed to handle up to 105 million cubic feet per day of gas.
This CPF capacity is 35 MMcfd bigger than envisaged before starting the front-end engineering and design work in mid-2022, Duncan Wallace, Chariot's technical director, told Proactive Investors website.
FEED work was completed by the Subsea Integration Alliance (SIA) of Subsea 7 and SLB and the two companies are now working up their commercial offers for what is expected to be an integrated engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning contract.
It is understood that Subsea 7 and SLB subsidiary OneSubsea would deliver the subsea umbilical, riser and flowline system and subsea production system, while SLB would be responsible for the CPF.
It is unclear if bid documents were issued to rival players such as McDermott, Saipem and TechnipFMC to get a better idea of market pricing, but this seems unlikely.
Wallace said he expected commercial responses to be delivered “in the coming months”.
In a December 2022 presentation, Chariot stated that the final investment decision could be taken by the end of June this year, with first gas flowing two years later.
The project’s first phase involves three subsea production wells — including the Anchois-2 well drilled by Chariot in 2022 — with multi-zone completions to enable gas recovery across multiple stacked sands.
Wallace said additional sands may be targeted during the drilling of development wells to boost the recoverable resources.
The subsea hardware will be designed to accommodate further wells and, likewise, the CPF will also be designed with expansion in mind if further exploration drilling is successful.
The Lixus block could house more than 2 trillion cubic feet of gas, while Chariot's surrounding Rissana licence has the potential to contain at least 7 Tcf of gas.
Chariot said a field development plan is being finalised by the Lixus joint venture partnership to enable the award of the production concession.
Last May, Christophe Rojas, production facilities sales manager at SLB, outlined how the oilfield service giant’s CPF workscope was expected to pan out.