In November 1978, a team of engineers crisscrossing 600,000 acres of Sharjah’s desert pinned down the first gas discovery in Sharjah, the Sajaa Asset.

When the Sajaa-1 well was drilled in May 1980 to 16,656 feet – roughly six times the height of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa – it was one of the largest gas discoveries in the UAE at the time. The engineering team worked without today’s technological luxuries – real-time updates from mobile phones and satellites – and navigated their way to success by unrolling dog-eared maps of the desert on the hot bonnets of their four-wheel drive vehicles. This pioneering spirit heralded the beginning of Sharjah’s energy industry.

The handed over concession had access to the other legacy infrastructure pre-2010. The Sajaa bullish streak after the discovery of the Sajaa field continued with the discovery of the nearby Moveyeid field in October 1981 and later in 1992 the discovery of Kahaif field.

In 1982, the first cargo of 500,000 barrels of condensate was exported from the Sajaa plant on the oil tanker ‘Amoco Savanah’ – the birth of Sharjah’s gas exporting business.

Gas sales started in 1982 to Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) and later to Dubai and the Northern Emirates in a new pipeline network. An agreement to build a liquified petroleum gas (LPG) terminal and export facilities in a new harbour at Hamriyah was signed in 1984, thus laying the foundation for a new Port facility in Sharjah, with it exporting its first load of LPG in 1986. Two world records followed in 2003. One was for the high efficient recovery of LPG products (Propane & Butane liquid) and another for a world-leading coiled tubing under balance drilling (CTD) campaign, which was managed by BP and the Sharjah Government.

SNOC owns and operates over 50 wells distributed in three fields and 2 hydrocarbon liquid storage and export terminals. The condensate terminal was constructed in 1981 in Hamriyah Sharjah and has two 500,000 barrels’ capacity tanks and one offshore Single Point Mooring (SPM) designed for multiple size tanker including VLCC tanker loading. Constructed in 1986, the LPG terminal has a dedicated loading jetty inside Hamriyah Port and Free Zone with 400,000 barrels and 300,000 barrels of propane and butane storage capacity, respectively.

With its existing facilities, infrastructure, strategic position and connectivity, SNOC is the only entity in the Northern Emirates capable of sending more than 1 billion standard cubic feet per day (Bscfd) efficiently into the market. All pipelines in the Northern Emirates converge at Sajaa, giving it the ability to transfer this gas to anywhere in the UAE – a valuable convergence of infrastructure in a region that lacks an intra-GCC gas pipeline network. These pipelines are owned and operated by SNOC, SEWA, Emarat, Dana Gas, DUSUP, ADNOC and Dolphin.

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