Equinor ASA has let a contract to John Wood Group PLC to provide engineering, procurement, construction, and installation (EPCI) services for a monoethylene glycol (MEG) upgrading project at the Gassco AS-operated Kollsnes natural gas processing plant in Øygarden, Norway, west of Bergen.
As part of the $42-million EPCI contract, Wood will upgrade the MEG regeneration handling capacity at the Kollsnes gas processing plant via installation of three new modules, including an MEG train, a chiller package, and an MEG export pump, Gassco and Equinor—the plant’s technical services provider—said on Sept. 17.
In a separate release, Wood said its management and engineering team in Sandefjord, Norway, will begin work on the Kollsnes MEG upgrade (KMU) project—which includes an extension of the plant’s fourth MEG train—immediately, with support from the firm’s process system experts across the globe.
As part of its scope of work on the KMU, Wood also has let a subcontract to Kværner ASA to deliver fabrication and installation services for the project’s new fourth MEG processing train, Kvaerner said in its own Sept. 17 release.
Fabrication and module-assembly of the new MEG processing train will take place at Kvaerner’s yard at Stord, Norway, from late-summer 2021, where upon completion, Kvaerner also will test the module before shipping it off to Kollsnes for installation during second-half 2022, according to the subcontractor.
Wood said the Equinor-awarded EPCI contract for the KMU follows the firm’s successful execution of the associated front-end engineering design study for the project in 2019.
Scheduled to be completed in 2023, the KMU comes as part of Gassco’s strategy to ensure longevity of the Kollsnes gas plant, which has the capacity to treat as much as 144.5 million cu m/day of gas that arrives from North Sea fields Troll, Kvitebjørn, Visund, and Fram. Kollsnes also plays a vital role in exports of Norwegian Continental Shelf-produced gas into Europe, with about 40% of all Norwegian gas exports moving through the plant, according to Gassco and Equinor.
Alongside further strengthening safety in MEG handling and helping maintain maximum plant capacity at Kollsnes in the long term, the KMU also will strengthen security of gas supplies to Europe, said Bjarte Padøy, plant manager at Kollsnes, and Frode Leversund, Gassco’s chief executive officer, respectively.
