China firm wins contract for Saudi Aramco Marjan oil and gas expansion

Chinese firm Cosco Shipping Specialized Carriers has won a contract to help expand Saudi Aramco's Marjan offshore facility, further cementing Beijing's economic presence in the region.

The firm, which provides shipping transportation services and is one of the largest in the world, will supply two semi-submersible vessels to help with transportation and installation services in the development of the Marjan facility.

The contract is linked to 'support package one' of the $12 billion Marjan Crude Increment Programme and aims at ramping up oil output at the facility by 300,000 barrels per day (bpd), and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) by 360,000 bpd. This will lead to an expected output of 800,000 bpd of oil.

The contract awarded to Cosco will support the construction of the new Marjan GOSP-4 platform ready to handle the output of 470,000 bpd of oil, 813,000 bpd of LNG, and 750 million cubic feet of gas per day.

The contract further confirms Saudi and Chinese economic cooperation, which has steadily increased over the last year as Riyadh seeks help implementing its Vision 2030 diversification programme.

Saudi Arabi recently sent a 24-person delegation to the World Economic Forum's "Summer Davos" conference in Tianjin, China, led by the Minister for Economy and Planning Faisal Al-Ibrahim and Minister for Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha.

It followed the 10th Arab-Chines Business Conference that was held in early June which saw thousands of participants and resulted in numerous agreements worth billions of dollars.

Although recent Saudi and Chinese economic cooperation has largely been outside the oil trade, the expansion of the Marjan facilities represents an affirmation by Saudi Arabia in retaining its status as a leading global energy supplier, with China one of the biggest recipients of Saudi oil.

The oilfield’s expansion has a multitude of packages aimed at securing the field's energy production into the future and has seen previous Chinese cooperation with the contracting of oil and gas firm Sinopec to assist with two pipeline projects for the Marjan expansion in 2019.