Dubai — Qatar Petroleum announced a new design contract Saturday with US engineers McDermott as it prepared to push ahead with plans to expand gas production by 30% at the giant North field in the Persian Gulf.

Already the world’s largest LNG producer, Qatar lifted a moratorium ongas developments at the giant non-associated gas field in April last year. Thenew projects will increase its LNG production capacity to more than 100million mt/year by 2023, up from 77 million mt/year currently.

Drilling for the gas expansion would start next year, state-owned QP saidin a statement Saturday.

“This is yet another milestone on the road to implementing one of themost ambitious gas projects in the southern sector of the North Field, andstarting the first LNG production from the new LNG mega-train by the end of2023,” QP CEO Saad al-Kaabi said in the statement.

The detailed design contract covering new offshore jackets, was “animportant step towards awarding the procurement, fabrication and installationcontract by the end of this year, which will pave the way to commence thedrilling campaign in 2019”, the statement showed.

This was part of a larger project which included six wellhead platforms,jackets and pipelines to produce 4.6 Bcf/d of gas from the North Fieldexpansion. This would add approximately 1 million b/d of oil equivalent toQatar’s production, Kaabi said.

In March Qatar selected Japan’s Chiyoda Corp. to carry out the front-endengineering and design for three new 7.8 million mt/year onshore LNGproduction trains.

Since January 1, Qatar had integrated its two LNG producers — Qatargasand RasGas – under a single operator, Qatargas. Its shareholders included QP,ExxonMobil, Total, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Mitsui and Marubeni.

Apart from adding more gas, the new trains were expected to also produceas much as 200,000 b/d of condensates, most of which would be for export.This would be a major boost for the state’s condensate exports which arecurrently between 300,000 b/d to 400,000 b/d.

Qatar would also start extracting ethane from its gas to use as feed stock in a new 1.6 million mt/year petrochemicals plant, which QP hoped would be ready by 2024.