Qatargas has announced the successful start-up of the Plateau Maintenance Project (PMP). The objective of the project is to ensure the production capacity of Qatargas 1 is maintained at 10 million tonnes per annum (MTA) of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) for many years to come.

The project involved drilling and recompleting offshore wells, adding new onshore facilities for sulfur handling and modifying existing LNG production trains 1, 2 and 3.

Khalid Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chief Executive Officer, Qatargas, said; “This is indeed a significant achievement for Qatargas. We want to ensure Qatargas 1 can produce 10 MTA until the end of the concession in2021 and well beyond. The Plateau Maintenance Project will help deliver that capability and enable Qatargas to continue to supply LNG safely and reliably to its customers. The project is yet another important milestone in Qatargas’ journey towards its Vision 2015, namely to be the World’s Premier LNG Company. ”

“I would also like to congratulate the project team and the contractors on the safe and successful start-up of the project and thank all those involved for their hard work and commitment over the years,” Khalid Bin Khalifa Al Thani added.

Khalid Bin Abdulla Al Thani, Qatargas Chief Operating Officer – Engineering and Ventures, noted “The highest priorities on this project were the safety of our workforce and ensuring no impacts to existing Qatargas assets or production. We added significant new onshore facilities to accommodate the increased volumes of feed gas and Hydrogen Sulfide (H₂S) from new wells. The additional quantities of H₂S will be treated in the new onshore sulfur plant built as part of the project. The new sulfur plant is capable of treating over 1 billion cubic feet per day (BCFD) of offshore feed gas. Numerous new and upgraded compression and utility units were also added.”

The onshore project had a major “brownfield” component, meaning virtually all of the work scope was conducted within existing operating facilities and equipment. The nature of the work presented a special challenge which required tremendous communication and alignment between several departments across Qatargas.

James Ierubino, Qatargas PMP Project Manager, noted “The project team, along with our contractors, have worked over 42 million man-hours in a very difficult operating plant work environment, achieving world class safety performance, including an exceptional Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) of 0.23 for every 200,000 hours worked (which equals one medical treatment or lost time injury occurring for every 1.25 million hours worked). More importantly, the project was shining example of Qatargas’ “Incident and Injury Free” culture, particularly our application of the STOP safety observation program, where a peak workforce of 6500 completed over 665,000 observation cards which helped identify and mitigate safety risks,”

The Shareholders in Qatargas 1 are Qatar Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Total, Mitsui and Marubeni.

Technip-Chiyoda Joint Venture was the Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor for the onshore work. Their major subcontractors included Kettaneh, Sepam, Descon and CCC.

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