Saipem and COOEC rake in $4 billion for work at QatarEnergy’s giant offshore gas field

December 22, 2025, by Melisa Cavcic

In partnership with China Offshore Oil Engineering Co. (COOEC), Italy’s engineering, drilling, and construction services giant Saipem has won a multibillion-dollar engineering, procurement, construction, and installation (EPCI) assignment with QatarEnergy LNG, a subsidiary of Qatar’s state-owned energy giant QatarEnergy. This brings the Italian heavyweight more work at a huge natural gas field off the north-eastern coast of Qatar.

The EPCI contract for the North Field Production Sustainability Offshore Compression Project (NFPS COMP 5) package has an overall value of approximately $4 billion, with Saipem’s share amounting to around $3.1 billion.

This project is part of QatarEnergy LNG’s strategy of maintaining and increasing the production capacity of the North Field, which is described as the world’s largest non-associated natural gas field.

With a total duration of around five years, the Italian giant’s assignment comprises engineering, procurement, fabrication and installation of two compression complexes, each including a compression platform, a living quarter platform, a flare platform supporting the gas combustion system, and the related interconnecting bridges.

Saipem explains that each complex will have a total weight of about 68,000 tons, with offshore installation operations to be carried out by the firm’s De He construction vessel approximately in 2029 and 2030.

The latest contract follows the EPCI COMP2 and COMP3 packages, which were awarded to the Italian giant in October 2022 and September 2024, respectively. These jobs are currently under execution.

The award of the COMP5 package is perceived to consolidate Saipem’s collaboration with QatarEnergy LNG, reinforcing the company’s presence in Qatar as a partner for the execution of complex large-scale projects.

The North Field, which is shared between Iran and Qatar, is known as South Pars on the Iranian side. With 15 appraisal wells drilled over a period of 14 years, the field was established to hold recoverable reserves of more than 900 trillion standard cubic feet (tscf).

Lying off the northeast shore of the Qatar peninsula, the field, discovered in 1971, covers an area of over 6,000 square kilometers, equivalent to about half the land area of the State of Qatar.

The North Field Expansion Project encompasses the North Field East (NFE), the North Field South (NFS), and North Field West (NFW) projects to raise the Persian Gulf state’s LNG production capacity from 77 to 142 million tons per annum (mtpa) in 2030.