Algeria’s national oil and gas company Sonatrach has awarded an $855m contract to China’s Jereh Group for a project to develop facilities at the Rhourde Nouss gas field.

Jereh Group said that its subsidiary Jereh Oil & Gas Engineering will build a natural gas booster station in the Rhourde Nouss gas field and upgrade and renovate related transmission pipelines.

The Yantai-based company cited a letter of award from Sonatrach and said that the contract will boost the company's footprint in North Africa’s oil and gas engineering service sector.

The Rhourde Nouss boosting project will centralise the boosting of natural gas produced by the gas field and the adjacent Gassi Touil gas field, to improve their production efficiency and natural gas processing capacity, the company said.

Sonatrach, the largest gas producing company in Africa and the largest state-owned enterprise in Algeria, will pay $629.1m and $226m for the construction of the project, Jereh said.

Jereh's growing footprint

Jereh has been expanding overseas in recent years and has won contracts with major Middle Eastern oil and gas clients, including Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.

In June 2021, the company was awarded a contract for the design, procurement and construction of a gas debottlenecking project in Algeria.

The project was located in the Bir Rebaa Nord and Rhourde Ouled Djemma fields, which are located in the eastern Algerian desert, about 300 kilometres southeast of Hessi Messaoud.

The client on that project was Groupement Sonatrach Eni, a joint venture of Sonatrach and Italian energy company Eni.