Nod for oil pipeline

Manama : The weekly Cabinet meeting held yesterday approved a request by the Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning to acquire land for the $350-million AB crude oil pipeline project linking Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The new oil pipeline to be built by Saudi Aramco and operated by Bapco will replace the existing AB-1 oil pipeline, which provides Bapco’s Sitra Refinery with feedstock crude oil. Bahrain currently imports about 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil from Saudi Arabia. 

The new pipeline will have a capacity of 360,000 bpd. The 115-kilometre, 24-30-inch diameter pipeline, will run from the Abqaiq processing facility in Saudi Arabia to Quarriyah and then offshore to Al-Jazayir beach and finally to Sitra in Bahrain. Nearly 60km of the pipeline will be onshore, while the remaining 45km will be offshore. 

The new AB pipeline will replace the ageing AB-1 pipeline, opened in 1945, which runs from Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq plant to Sitra Refinery in Bahrain. The new 30-inch diameter 115-km pipeline, of which 42km is subsea and 73km on land, will raise the transport capacity from the current 230,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 350,000 bpd, with the flexibility to increase to 400,000 bpd. The project is jointly managed by Bapco and Aramco.

The new pipeline is expected to open in the first quarter of 2018 and dismantling the existing pipeline is expected to begin in the second half of 2018, according to reports.

The Cabinet session was chaired by HRH Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa at Gudaibiya Place.