News
Tengizchevroil (TCO)
TCO’s production capacity rose with the commissioning of the Second-Generation Expansion Project in 2008, which includes the Second-Generation Plant (SGP) and Sour Gas Injection (SGI) facilities. This expansion allowed TCO not only to double oil production in Tengiz, but also to improve the environmental performance and increase production efficiency. TCO completed the expansion in the third quarter of 2008, which brought daily capacity to 75,000 metric tons (600,000 barrels) of crude oil and 22 million cubic meters (750 million standard cubic feet) of gas. SGP stabilizes and sweetens crude oil, as well as separates and processes natural gas into gas products and elemental sulphur. SGP is the largest single sour crude processing train in the world.
SGI re-injects one third of produced sour gas back into the Tengiz reservoir at extremely high pressures to maintain reservoir pressure. The injection compressor is like no other compressor in the world and represents the state of the art in sour gas injection technology. SGI enables about 25% of total TCO oil production as well as pressure maintenance to reservoir. ABLE supplied myriad instrumentation to the original SGP Project back in 2006/7, including 35 Ultrasonic Clamp-on Flow Meters for both liquid and gas applications. This expansion doubled the production of existing processing facilities. ABLE scope also included Russian technical documentation including Metrology & GOST approvals. Having provided sterling service for 16 years, certain meters on the sour gas service needed replacing. ABLE were contracted in this regard and supplied several dual channel meters built into cradles, ready to drop into the existing hazardous area enclosures. When TCO’s Future Growth Project (FGP) was approved in 2018, ABLE were commissioned to supply over £14M worth of instrumentation, the legacy of our recognition as a proven supply & service partner to SGP. FGP represented major plant expansion. The project uses sour gas injection technology, successfully developed and proven during TCO’s previous expansion in 2008, to increase Tengiz crude oil production capacity by about 12 million tonnes per year/260,000 barrels per day to about 39 million tonnes per year/850,000 barrels per day – equivalent to current total North Sea output.