Saudi Aramco has launched the Karan offshore gas field. This is the company’s first offshore non-associated gas field project. It started flowing earlier this month and is being transported by subsea pipeline to the onshore Khursaniyah Gas Plant.
Discovered in April 2006, Karan is the first non-associated gas field in Saudi territorial waters in the Arabian Gulf, 160 kilometers north of the company’s headquarters in Dhahran.
Offshore facilities at Karan consist of five production platform complexes connected to a main tie-in platform, installed with associated electrical power, communication and state-of-the-art remote monitoring and control facilities for safe and reliable operations from onshore. Detailed design work began in March 2009.
The field was discovered when the Karan-6 well drilled into Khuff formations, finding gas in carbonate reservoirs laid down from 200 to 300 million years ago in the Permian and Triassic periods. With Khuff’s gross thickness of up to 1,000 feet, Karan’s is the thickest Khuff reservoir section ever encountered in Saudi Arabia. The Khuff formation ranges in depth from 10,500-13,700 feet, and Karan lies in medium-depth waters of 40-60 meters.
A 110-kilometer subsea pipeline is transporting Karan gas to onshore processing facilities at the Khursaniyah Gas Plant. The gas is processed through a number of trains that include facilities for gas sweetening, acid-gas enrichment, gas dehydration and supplementary propane refrigeration.
The onshore facilities also include a cogeneration plant, a sulfur recovery unit with storage tank, substations and a transmission pipeline linked to the Kingdom’s Master Gas System (MGS).
Karan, designed to produce 1.8 billion standard cubic feet per day (SCFD) of raw dry gas by 2013 to support the MGS, will be produced from 21 increment wells distributed over five offshore wellhead platforms.
