The biggest players in the oil and gas industries are assembling in Oran, Algeria today for the 3-day LNG 16 conference, which brings together more than 2,500 attendees for the largest event in the world dedicated to the liquefied natural gas industry. As a global leader in LNG technology, GE Oil & Gas — which has been operating in Algeria for over 45 years — not only has a big presence at the summit, but it has just announced new deals in the country. In a $100 million contract with Petrofac, which provides services to many of the world’s largest oil & gas companies, GE is providing turbo compression equipment for the use in the El Merk Project, which is located in a harsh, remote section of the Sahara. It comes as GE’s new $36M investment in Algeria to expand the ALGESCO Service Center — which will be the largest GE Oil & Gas Service Center in the world — is nearing completion and will be formally inaugurated later this year.
Thinking big: GE Oil & Gas, with $7.7 billion in revenue in 2009, has more than 12,000 employees in 100 countries. Algeria, which is the third largest supplier of gas to Europe, has one of GE’s largest installed equipment bases including more than 400 gas turbines, more than 340 compressors and 35,000 km of inspected pipelines.
In LNG production, gas is liquefied to make it easier to transport via ship or pipeline. As The Center for LNG describes it: “Natural gas is converted to LNG by cooling it to -260° F, at which point it becomes a liquid. This process reduces its volume by a factor of more than 600 — similar to reducing the volume of a beach ball to the volume of a ping-pong ball.”
GE supplies technologies used up and down the full LNG chain, including the critical series of compressors known as “compression trains” that are required for virtually all of the major LNG processes. For example, in the massive Gorgon project off the coast of Australia, GE’s “Refrigerant Compression Trains” will be chilling the natural gas to a liquid state. That technology is also driving the QatarGas 2 project, which now boasts the largest LNG plant in the world, featuring four trains. And at the heart of those LNG trains are twelve of the largest refrigeration compressor systems manufactured by GE.
Tech talk: Liquefied natural gas is loaded onto ships and eventually offloaded and turned back into a gas. In addition to presenting technical papers at the summit, the Oil & Gas team is participating in a panel with Shell and ExxonMobil on “Technical Innovations for the Future of the LNG business.” Some of GE’s latest innovations are being put through their paces in Massa, Italy, where GE Oil & Gas recently invested over $9 million in a new test bed in preparation for the oncoming increase in liquefied natural gas activity. The new facility is designed for thermodynamic and mechanical tests on large compressors.
In addition to the Algeria news, GE Oil & Gas last week announced a joint venture in India to design, manufacture, supply, sell and service advanced technology steam turbines. It also announced a new memorandum of understanding with Vietnam that will be the basis for a long-term collaboration on the supply of advanced oil and gas equipment, services and spare parts.
Filling the pipeline: The M.O.U. with Vietnam was signed by Nguyen Quoc Thap, vice president of Petrovietnam and Marco Caccavale, general manager of GE Oil & Gas in North America. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, center, attended the ceremony in Washington D.C.
* Read today’s Algeria announcement
* Read the announcement about GE’s joint venture in India
* Read the announcement about GE’s new agreement in Vietnam
* Read “A monster of a deal gets bigger: Gorgon passes $1.1B” on GE Reports
* See more GE Oil & Gas stories on GE Reports
* Read about GE’s new turbine becoming an ecomagination-certified product
* Learn more about LNG technology
* Learn more about our LNG test facility