Wood Group wins Kashagan oil field equipment support deal

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LONDON, April 3 (Reuters) - British energy service firm Wood Group said it had won a contract to support gas turbines and compressors on Kazakhstan's troubled Kashagan oil field, where conditions make extreme demands on equipment.

The eight-year contract, which began in January, will be executed by a joint venture between Wood Group (Frankfurt: JWG1.F - news) and Kazakh service firm KazTurboRemont.

It is the biggest contract to date won by Wood Group's gas turbines division - GTS - and will involved maintaining and repairing 15 gas turbines, as well as all driven equipment, steam turbines, standby diesels and compressors, the company said on Thursday.

Kashagan, a $50 billion project that is expected to produce 75,000 barrels per day, has been offline since October when onshore pipes carrying corrosive gases sprang leaks and brought production to a halt just one month after the start-up. No problems have been reported with the compressors.

The project is among one of the world's most technologically ambitious, with the oil 4,200 metres (4,590 yards) below the seabed at very high pressure and the associated gas mixed with some of the highest concentrations of toxic, metal-eating hydrogen sulphide (H2S) ever encountered.

In order to overcome the high pressures and H2S content, specific compressors had to be developed for Kashagan, Total (Brussels: FP.BR - news) , a member of the operating consortium, said on its website.

Two of the compressors are known among the thousands of workers on Kashagan as "the widow maker" and "the rotating bomb", which a consortium spokesman pointed out refer not to unsafe working conditions but to their complexity. (Reporting by Stephen Eisenhammer; editing by Jane Baird)