McDermott has secured a subsea contract from Eni for the Cronos gas development offshore Cyprus, with the award valued at between $500 million and $750 million under the contractor’s classification system.
The contract covers project management, engineering, procurement and installation support for the deepwater project. It is McDermott’s first subsea project award from Eni.
Work will involve the contractor’s subsea and floating facilities teams in Houston, Perth, London and Kuala Lumpur, together with its marine construction fleet.
McDermott also referenced its ultra-deepwater construction vessel Amazon in announcing the contract. The company did not disclose a vessel deployment schedule or detailed offshore installation scope.
Cronos is being developed in Block 6 by Eni and its 50:50 partner TotalEnergies, around 185 km southwest of Cyprus.
The field holds more than 3trn cubic feet of gas initially in place and is planned with four subsea production wells. First gas is targeted for 2028.
Production is expected to reach around 500m standard cubic feet per day, equivalent to roughly 2.8m tonnes per annum of LNG.
Instead of developing a standalone processing and export system in Cyprus, the partners plan to route Cronos gas through existing infrastructure in Egypt.
Gas will be processed at Eni’s Zohr facilities before being sent to the Damietta LNG plant for liquefaction and export, principally to Europe.
Final investment approval for Cronos was reached in late July, moving the development into the execution phase.
The field was discovered in 2022 and appraised through the Cronos-2 well in early 2024. Testing of the appraisal well indicated potential production of more than 150m standard cubic feet per day from a single well.
Block 6 also contains the Calypso discovery and Zeus, which was discovered in 2022.
Eni and TotalEnergies signed an agreement with Cyprus and Egypt in February last year covering the framework for routing Cronos gas through Egyptian infrastructure.
Cronos is planned to become Eni’s first producing development in Cyprus and the country’s first hydrocarbon project to reach production.
Other project packages have also been linked to the development. Westwood Energy reported that China Merchants Heavy Industry secured the floating control unit contract, while Baker Hughes was identified as the frontrunner for the subsea production system.
Eni has not publicly detailed those awards in the same way as the McDermott contract.
The Cronos award follows another major offshore contract for McDermott. Splash reported last month that the company secured an EPCI package worth more than $1 billion from ADNOC for the Umm Shaif gas development offshore Abu Dhabi.
