Upgradation and Replacement of Flowlines ready for award
Five pre-qualified companies have submitted their bids for the two Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) Contracts of Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) for upgrading and replacement of flow lines.
The project involves replacement of existing underground crude oil and gas flow lines in the south and southeast and the upgrade and rehabilitation of 17 Gathering Centers (GCs) and 3 Gas Booster Stations.
The bid results are as follows:
Package A
Petrofac International $663 million
SK Engineering & Construction $736 million
SNC Lavalin $776 million
LG Engineering & Construction $796 million
Tecnicas Reunidas $823 million
Package B
SK Engineering & Construction $1190 million
Petrofac International $1216 million
LG Engineering & Construction $1236 million
SNC Lavalin $1243 million
Tecnicas Reunidas $1303 million
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The packages are part of a wider KOC program to upgrade and modernize its aging oil and gas field infrastructure as it seeks to increase oil production, which is hovering at just under 2.5 million barrels a day. The scheme is also aimed at improving safety following an explosion at the Rawdhatain Oil Field in early 2002.
Kuwait‘s First Private Airline ready for take-off
AL-JAZEERA AIRWAYS, Kuwait’s first low-cost private airline, is set to start operations by the first quarter of 2005. Boodai Group, which owns the new airline, has been in negotiation with the Boeing Company of the US and Airbus Industries of Europe for purchasing an initial fleet of four aircraft. Initially, the airline plans to operate A320s and fly within a two-hour radius.
Shares in the Airline’s initial public offering were more than 12 times oversubscribed when the project was launched earlier this year. Al-Jazeera offered $23.6 million of its $33.9 million capital, raising subscriptions of $285 million.
Shuaiba Pumping Plant Project
A Japanese / South Korean Group of Toroshima Pumps and Doosan Heavy Industries has been awarded the long-awaited Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) contract to expand and upgrade the Pumping Plant “C” at Shuaiba. The contract worth $82.7 million will take about three years to implement. The client is Public Authority for Industry.
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The scheme calls for the supply and installation of 13 pumps and associated electrical and pipeline infrastructure to raise water pumping capacity at the plant to 200,000 cubic meters an hour (cm/h) from 130,000 cm/h. Toroshima will carry out the project’s mechanical and electrical works, with Doosan undertaking the project’s civil engineering and piping modifications. Mott MacDonald of the United Kingdom is the consultant.
The Government is planning to build a new 96,000 cm/h pumping plant at Shuaiba (known as Pumping Plant “D”) on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) basis. However, industry sources say the project is likely to end up being conventionally financed.
Smoking linked to pancreatic cancer….!!
Smoking may speed the growth of pancreatic cancer by causing it to develop in younger people, according to a recent study by US researchers. The study presented at a meeting of cancer specialists in Chicago, may help doctors better understand a particularly deadly cancer, which kills virtually all of its victims within a year. Dr. Randall Brand and colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois studied 18,346 pancreatic cancer patients treated between 1993 and 2003. The patients taken from a data base of 350 hospitals around the country, all gave smoking histories.
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Faro and colleagues tested 10 volunteers. Six of them were asked to shoot a toy gun and then lie and say they didn’t do it. Three others who watched told the truth about what happened. One volunteer dropped out of the study. While giving their “testimony” the volunteers were hooked up both to a conventional polygraph and also had their brain activity imaged using fMRI, which used a strong magnet to provide a realtime picture of brain activity.
“Smoking appears to accelerate the onset of pancreatic cancer development”, Dr. Brand told a news conference. The median age for the patients was 73. But current smokers were diagnosed at 63 – a full 10 years sooner.
People who had smoked in the past and quite were diagnosed at 70. Dr. Brand said that other studies have indicated that smoking can affect both the initial development and spread of cancer. “Since the age of diagnosis of previous smokers was younger than non-smokers, this suggests that smoking could impact upon the initiation phase”, Dr. Brand said.
In 2005, an estimated 32,180 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and 31,800 people will die from it, according to American Cancer Society projections. It is the fourth leading cause of cancer death. “Since pancreatic cancer is almost uniformly fatal, a younger age of onset means more potential years of life lost. Thus, these findings offer yet another important reason for individuals not only to stop smoking, but never to start”, Dr. Brand said. Smoking also causes lung, oesophageal and bladder cancer, among others.
A second study presented at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that adding a new drug to standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer gave some patients a few extra weeks of life. The new drug, Erlotinib, is sold under the brand name Tarceva by Genentech Inc and OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc and is one of a new generation of targeted cancer drugs that affects a molecule used by tumor cells to grow.
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