Petroleum Development Oman has begun producing oil from the southern Zalzala field, PDO's first multi-well field to come on stream in the last four years.
The site in the Harweel cluster is producing oil and gas from a depth of some five kilometre's (three miles), making it PDO's deepest producing oil field in reservoir rocks more than half a billion years old.
"For development of this scale and complexity, the project was executed in a very short timeframe," said Steven Van Rossen, PDO project manager.
"Initially production was achieved just 19 months after the final investment decision by the company's shareholders. All in all, from the discovery of the Zalzala field in 2001 to its first production took only three years.
"That is also got to be a record for this kind of deep, sour, high pressure oil field," he noted.
Production from the cluster, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Marmul, is set to increase gradually over the first half of the year as three more fields - Ghafeer, Sakhiya and Dafaq - are brought on stream.
By the end of the year, output is expected to reach an average of 18,000 barrels of oil and 30 million cubic feet of gas per day.
PDO, the sultanate's leading oil company, plans to initiate a second phase of development at Harweel based on an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process.
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