MILAN, Italy, 25 September 2005 — The Hawiyah Natural Gas Liquids Project aims to boost Saudi Arabia’s petrochemical feedstock for the Kingdom’s ambitious industrialization plans, but the project itself is giving a boost to Saudization efforts through a variety of direct and indirect job creation and training efforts that already have exceeded contract targets.
Friday in Milan, representatives from international engineering contractors Snamprogetti, JGC, General Dynamics, Yokogawa and GE Nuevo Pignone detailed their progress on the Hawiyah project, which will add hundreds of thousands of barrels of petrochemical feedstock daily to the flow to the industrial cities of Jubail on the Arabian Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea.
The contractors, working with a team of Saudi Aramco engineers led by Mohammad Hamad from project management and Mohammad Al-Saeed of gas operations, reported progress on all fronts with a significant amount of work ahead of schedule. The contractors also noted they had already surpassed Saudization targets and expected to continue the trend.
Snamprogetti project manager Enzo Erdoni discussed the status of the company’s work on the gas trains, flare system and pipe rack. He said that the 27-month project would employ nearly 4,000 workers during the construction peak in 2006 with an estimated 14.2 million man-hours involved.
Erdoni said Snamprogetti already is about 33 percent above its initial Saudization target. The Italian-based company is working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran and high schools across Saudi Arabia to find talented students who will join its project teams in Kingdom. Its personnel will help to train young Saudi engineers to work under Saudi Aramco’s exacting standards. Erdoni said the company hopes to have 45 Saudi engineers joining its ranks in the coming months.
“We will include as many Saudi engineers as we can on our team,” Erdoni said.
Satoshi Sato, project manager for the Japanese-based engineering firm JGC, noted that Saudi-based Radicon Gulf Construction was working on 11 of the 18 buildings in its portion of the Hawiyah project. Sato said JGC was hiring Saudis for its home-office engineering department and that all the later construction drawings would be done in Saudi Arabia.
JGC is working with 10 Saudi suppliers in its materials procurement. The company also is working with Saudi Aramco to help local suppliers take on complicated projects that otherwise might be beyond their experience.
JGC expects to have 4,900 men working on its part of construction in the Hawiyah project at its peak with an estimated 16.8 million man-hours involved.
Additionally, JGC is starting a training school to qualify Saudis for good-paying jobs in the construction trades.
Sato said that the Saudi Aramco project managers assisting JGC in Japan are an integral part of the JGC team, and employees of the two companies often take part in trips and other recreational activities together.
I. Uchida, CEO of Yokogawa — one of the world’s leading process control companies — used the event to announce the company’s plan to open a process control office later this year in Alkhobar in the Eastern Province. “Initially, it will have 30 employees,” Uchida said. “Eventually, we hope to create 100 jobs.”
