California-based Fluor lands contract for Alberta oil sands venture

Gary Park

Petroleum News Calgary correspondent

Fluor, the California-based engineering giant, has landed the first major contract for the Long Lake oil sands project in Alberta, a joint venture between OPTI Canada and Nexen.

The US$570 million job extends Fluor’s involvement since late 2001 in the front-end engineering for the first oil sands project to combine steam-assisted gravity drainage extraction technology with on-site upgrading.

Among other things, Fluor will undertake detailed engineering of three upgrader units.

Construction of the C$3.2 billion project is scheduled to start later this year, targeting a July 2007 start-up and peak output of 58,500 barrels per day of light, sweet synthetic crude in the first phase. The Long Lake lease holds about 1.9 billion barrels of recoverable bitumen.