Aramco expects Jafurah to deliver up to 2 billion cubic feet a day of sales gas by 2030, alongside 420 million cubic feet a day of ethane and around 630,000 barrels a day of liquids. The ethane is what the Kingdom's chemical industry has been waiting for.
Discussion of Saudi Arabia's gas expansion concentrates on the headline figure, and the more consequential number for the country's industrial base is a smaller one further down the list.
Aramco expects Jafurah to deliver up to 2 billion standard cubic feet a day of sales gas by 2030, alongside 420 million cubic feet a day of ethane and around 630,000 barrels a day of high-value liquids. The field is estimated to hold 229 trillion standard cubic feet of raw gas and 75 billion barrels of condensate and liquids.
The ethane is the industrial story.
Ethane is the feedstock of choice for producing ethylene, which is the base molecule of the polyethylene and derivatives chain. Crackers can run on ethane or on heavier liquid feedstocks such as naphtha, and the choice determines both the cost position and the product slate. An ethane cracker is cheaper to run where ethane is available at a low price, and it produces a narrower range of outputs, weighted heavily to ethylene.
That is the basis of the Gulf's historical advantage in petrochemicals, and it has been eroding for a decade. Ethane availability in Saudi Arabia has been constrained by domestic gas supply, and the industry's growth has increasingly relied on liquid feedstocks that put Gulf producers on a similar cost footing to their competitors rather than ahead of them. Meanwhile United States producers have had abundant ethane from shale gas.
Four hundred and twenty million cubic feet a day is a material addition to that constrained supply. It does not restore the position of two decades ago, and it changes the arithmetic for domestic crackers and for any new investment considering the Kingdom.
The liquids matter for a different reason. Six hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day of condensate and natural gas liquids is a substantial stream that feeds refining and chemical processing, and it is usually what makes the economics of an unconventional gas development work. Dry gas alone at domestic prices would struggle to justify the drilling intensity a shale development requires; liquids at crude-linked values do the heavy lifting.
The processing infrastructure follows. Extracting ethane and liquids from raw gas requires fractionation capacity, and the Tanajib gas plant, in service since December 2025 and expected to reach 2.6 billion cubic feet a day of raw gas processing capacity, is part of that chain.
For the contracting market this is domestic work of the most conventional kind: processing trains, fractionation, compression, pipelines and storage, built inside the Kingdom by contractors competing against the same resource constraints as every other Gulf gas programme.