On November 5, 2026, Norwegian engineering company Aker Solutions officially announced receipt of the award letter from Vietnam's PTSC Mechanical and Construction to provide detailed design services for the Maydan Mahzam offshore oil field redevelopment project under Qatar Energy. This contract falls into the company's scalable category, with a corresponding amount of 500 million to 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner, approximately 380 million to 1.15 billion yuan.

Century old oilfield launches $5 billion large-scale renovation

The Maydan Mahzam oil field is located about 100 kilometers northeast of the Qatar coast and 28 kilometers southeast of Halul Island, with an operating depth of about 40 meters. It was discovered in the 1960s along with the neighboring Bul Hanine oil field and was officially put into production in 1965. It is the oldest batch of offshore oil fields still in stable production in Qatar. The estimated total investment for this overall redevelopment project is between 4 billion and 5 billion US dollars. After the renovation is completed, the daily production of the oil field will remain stable at 25000 barrels. The plan includes the development of 45 new wells, covering the four main oil reservoirs of Arab A to D. At the same time, old facilities that have been in operation for decades will be renovated and reused.

The project is divided into four sections, and in September 2026, PTSC M&C won the EPIC-1 general contracting section with a total value of over 3 billion US dollars. This is also the largest offshore oil and gas project undertaken by the company since its establishment, with an execution period from the fourth quarter of 2026 to the end of 2031. The design work undertaken by Aker Solutions covers three large upper modules, four conduit racks, and an old facility renovation and connection project. All design tasks will be completed by engineering teams from Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai in collaboration.

100000 ton steel structure manufacturing is about to enter the release window

The total steel structure weight of EPIC-1 section exceeds 100000 tons, with core facilities including central processing platform PS2K, public facilities and living building platform PS2L, riser platform PS2R, etc. Among them, the single weight of the upper module of PS2K alone reaches 19000 tons. The detailed design of Aker Solutions is the forefront of the entire project construction chain. After all the drawings are finalized, the subsequent steel structure prefabrication, process module procurement, and core equipment orders will be released in sequence. Keywords: oil fields, Middle East news

Unlike the new oilfield development project, this renovation requires seamless integration between the newly constructed offshore facilities and the old production system that has been in operation for over 60 years. It involves a large amount of historical facility retesting, precise layout of shutdown windows, and integration and debugging work. The complexity of project execution is much higher than that of conventional new oil and gas platforms.Editor/Cheng Liting