The second largest in the country, the treatment and processing
plant in the Palmyra region has a design capacity of 7.5 MCM/day of raw
gas. Its expansion to this capacity was completed in late 1999 as part
of the second phase in the development of five non-associated gas fields
in the area.
The fields are: Arak, Ha'il and Dubayat, which contain sweet
gas and were put on stream through 1996 for the plant's first
phase; and Najib and Sokhne which have sour gas and came on stream in
early 2000 (see profiles of Syria's gas fields in Gas Market Trends
of this week).
The plant's first phase, consisting of units to process both
sweet and sour gases, came on stream in late 1996 with a combined
capacity of 4.5 MCM/day. However, it has only been able to operate at
the rate of about 3 MCM/day, which was the capacity of Arak, Ha'il
and Dubayat fields. Clean gas from the plant has since supplied the
Zaizoun power station in central Syria near Idlib, which has a capacity
of 384 MW, through a 120-km pipeline. But the extra capacity will be
handy to process any gas from fields in the region to be discovered in
the future.
The Phase-II plant, adjacent to Phase-1, has units which were
completed in late 1999 and came on stream in early 2000. This is
processing the gas from the Najib and Sokhne fields. Its installed
capacity is 3 MCM/day.
A 250-km pipeline has been built to carry clean gas from the plant
to the Aleppo power station whose first three 200 MW units started up in
early 2000. The station's other two 200 MW units were completed in
2002/03, when the pipeline from the plant was expanded.
The five Palmyra fields are linked to two major pipelines completed
in early 2002: the one carrying gas to the power station in Aleppo, and
the other to a line with a larger pipe carrying gas from the Omar field
and processing facilities to the 400 MW Tishreen power station just
south of Damascus. The latter pipeline came on stream in August 1992.
Now the line also reaches the 630 MW Mhardeh power plant (on the
Mediterranean coast north-west of Hama) and the 680 MW Banias power
station, refinery and terminal centre.
Through these new pipelines, the fields have helped increase gas
supplies to the power sector and industries. They will enable the power
plants to be expanded further in the coming years.
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