Special report: Dolphin Energy

Adel Ahmed Al Buainain spends the majority of his time in Qatar.
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Mubadala, Total and Oxy have turned pipe dreams into reality with the region’s most impressive collaborative energy project to date. Adel Al Buainain, general manager - Qatar, Dolphin Energy leads our unique country profile with his insights a year on from inauguration

The first cross-border gas processing plant and pipeline network to be built in the Middle East became operational in July 2007, linking Qatar’s vast North Field to the energy-hungry economies of the UAE and Oman. Estimated at US$5 billion project is an unprecedented achievement for the region and, it’s easily argued, still the best example of Gulf co-operation to date.

Conceived in the early 1990s by the governments of the UAE and Qatar, the project was brought through to fruition by a private company, Dolphin Energy, 51% owned by Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s investment arm.

Key to bringing the best technical abilities to the project were IOC giants, Total and Occidental, each holding a minority stake. As the economies of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman boom, energy demands have followed suit, and it is the need for greater electricity generation that has spurred the project on.

The 364km pipeline runs from Ras Laffan, on the upper tip of the Qatar Peninsula, to Taweelah in Abu Dhabi, one of the capital’s primary electricity and desalination plants. From there, gas is piped overland to Dubai, Al Ain, Fujairah and Oman.

In the last year, Dolphin Energy achieved its target production rate of two billion cubic feet per day (bcfd), roughly equivalent to 350,000 barrels of oil – each day.

“In the 1990s, I was begging people to buy gas from Qatar. Now my problem is how to say no!” said Qatar’s deputy premier and minister of energy and industry, Abdullah al Attiyah at the launch ceremony last year.

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Qatar’s vast North Field is the largest gas deposit in the world, with about 900 trillion cubic feet of reserves.

Abu Dhabi itself has huge gas reserves, but production of its sour product is an expensive undertaking, and importing Qatar’s sweeter natural gas remains attractive.

Oil and Gas Middle East met Adel Al Buainain, general manager - Qatar, Dolphin Energy, one year after the historic inauguration, to uncover what has been going on behind the scenes across the project, but with a focus on the host nation and resource owner.

Al Buainain is responsible for all of Dolphin Energy’s activities in the State of Qatar, including the 24 offshore gas wells and twin production platforms, the twin sealines to Ras Laffan and the Dolphin Gas Processing Plant at Ras Laffan Industrial City. “The project has been rolled out in stages, so it has been a very successful year,” he begins. “The launch last summer was followed by the first commercial deliveries of gas to Oman in November last year, so we have not been static. We’ve also spent the last few years trying to optimise and fine tune the operations, and making sure the plant is delivering to the potential it was designed for,” says Buainain.

Core infrastructure aside, construction still continues for Dolphin, which has been charged with developing additional condensate storage in Qatar. “There are a number of common facilities shared by a number of operators in Ras Laffan, and we are managing the condensate tank storage facility. We are supervising the construction of these new facilities. There is also a common sulphur processing facility, being operated by QatarGas, and we are responsible for the connection from our plant to that facility, which is still under construction.”

These facilities are scheduled to be completed by mid-2010, but as far as the sulphur plant is concerned, QatarGas has the operational timeframe is in its hands.

“The condensate expansion is to meet the requirements of Qatar GTL. They are now in the construction phase and are expected to be on line later this year. As soon as they start producing the condensate they will store it in these tanks. Originally we had three tanks for Dolphin use, now to meet Qatar GTL’s requirements we are adding another three tanks,” he says.

The whole project will be finished by year-end 2011. Phase one is the construction of two tanks, which is on track to finish sometime next year.

The Barzan project, reported earlier this year as cancelled by newswire Reuters, has in fact just been delayed for a year, but Al Buainian says Dolphin Energy is not altering its own project schedules. “It’s been a rolling development, and we were selected to manage the contractor for this part of the overall grand plan, and sticking to our costs and schedules is our priority.”

Qatar has delayed the large-scale Barzan natural gas field project to be developed with ExxonMobil to benefit from a drop in construction cost, the country’s oil minister said after cancellation reports emerged.

“We delayed on purpose,” Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah said. “We decided to delay due to costs because the price trend (of construction) has changed since 2008.”

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