Aramco has started production from the Marjan crude oil increment, raising the offshore field's capacity by 300,000 barrels a day of Arabian Medium crude to around 800,000 barrels a day. The project also delivers 360,000 barrels a day of ethane and natural gas liquids, and was commissioned alongside the Tanajib Gas Plant.
Aramco has started production from the Marjan crude oil increment, the offshore expansion that raises output from the field by 300,000 barrels a day of Arabian Medium crude and takes Marjan's total production capacity to around 800,000 barrels a day. It is one of the largest single additions of offshore oil capacity anywhere in the past decade.
The start-up was confirmed by the company on 26 February, alongside the commencement of operations at the Tanajib Gas Plant, which handles the associated gas that the expanded field produces. The increment is designed to deliver a further 360,000 barrels a day of ethane and natural gas liquids on top of the crude, which is why the two projects were always going to be commissioned together.
Marjan is not a new field. It has been producing for decades, and the increment is an expansion of an existing offshore complex rather than a greenfield development, which makes it considerably harder to build than the barrel count suggests. New platforms, pipelines and tie-ins have to be installed in and around facilities that are still producing, on a schedule dictated by weather windows, vessel availability and shutdown planning rather than by engineering preference.
The scale of the contracting reflects that. In 2019 Aramco awarded contracts valued at about $18 billion to increase production capacity at Marjan and at the neighbouring Berri field, a package of 34 separate contracts covering offshore facilities, onshore processing and the utilities to support them. Estimates of the Marjan increment programme alone have put it in the region of $12 billion.
Much of the heavy fabrication went abroad. China Offshore Oil Engineering Company built and delivered one of the largest offshore platforms Aramco has ever commissioned for the project, fabricated in China and shipped to the Gulf. That is a useful reminder of where the limits of local industrial capacity currently sit: Saudi Arabia has built a deep supply chain in pipe, valves and modular fabrication, but topsides of that size are still sourced from a handful of yards worldwide.
Work in the field has not stopped with the start-up. At the end of December, Aramco called off a contract release purchase order with Saipem covering subsea interventions at Marjan together with a short onshore pipeline and associated tie-ins, one of a steady run of offshore awards placed under long-term agreements as the field is brought up to its new plateau.
Marjan is also not the end of the programme. The Zuluf increment, which shares the Tanajib processing plant, remains under construction, and the offshore fields north of Jubail have become the centre of gravity for Aramco's capacity work. That has consequences well beyond the upstream: offshore expansion consumes line pipe, valves, wellheads, cable and marine construction on a scale that onshore drilling does not, and it is the main reason Saudi Arabia's oilfield manufacturing base has been growing around Dammam and the eastern industrial cities.
The industrial significance of the increment is less about headline capacity than about grade and durability. Arabian Medium is a sour crude that complex refiners are configured to run, and offshore fields such as Marjan and Zuluf are where Aramco's incremental capacity is being sourced as conventional onshore production matures. Sustaining a stated production capability is not a passive exercise; it requires a continuous programme of drilling, water injection and facility construction simply to stand still, and increments of this scale are what create headroom on top of that.
The other significance is downstream of the wellhead. The 360,000 barrels a day of ethane and NGL the increment is designed to yield is petrochemical feedstock, and feedstock allocation has been the practical limit on Saudi chemical expansion for years. An offshore oil project, in other words, is also a chemicals project, and Marjan is the clearest current example of how tightly Aramco has tied the two together.