DOHA (Reuters) – China’s state-owned oil and gas giant Sinopec will take a 5% stake in Qatar’s North Field East expansion, part of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, state news agency QNA reported on Wednesday.
Sinopec did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
QatarEnergy had said previously that it could give up to a 5% stake in the project to some buyers, which QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi called “value-added partners”.
Last November, Sinopec signed a deal in which QatarEnergy agreed to supply 4 million tonnes of LNG annually for 27 years, the longest LNG contract ever signed by Qatar.
At the time, Sinopec said the agreement was part of an “integrated partnership”, which indicated the Chinese firm could be considering acquiring a stake in Qatar’s North Field expansion export facility.
QatarEnergy last year signed five deals for North Field East, the first and larger phase of the two-phase North Field expansion plan, which includes six LNG trains that will ramp up Qatar’s liquefaction capacity to 126 million tonnes per year by 2027 from 77 million tonnes.
It also signed three partnership agreements on the Gulf Arab state’s North Field South expansion.
QatarEnergy has said it plans to retain a 75% stake overall in the North Field expansion which will cost at least $30 billion, including construction of liquefaction export facilities.
The North Field is part of the world’s biggest gas field that Qatar shares with Iran, which calls its share South Pars.
(Reporting by Andrew Mills in Doha, Maha El Dahan, Tala Ramadan and Nayera Abdallah in Dubai; writing by Andrew Mills and Nadine Awadalla; editing by Jan Harvey and Jason Neely)
