'Qatar gas to reach UAE in mid-2007'

A pipeline to carry Qatari gas to the United Arab Emirates has been completed and supplies are expected to start in mid-2007, the head of UAE's Dolphin Energy said on Sunday.
Doubts about the $3.5 billion Dolphin Energy project surfaced in July when Saudi Arabia told minority partners in the project, France's Total and US Occidental Petroleum, it had reservations about the pipeline route.
Dolphin said then it had not received any objection from Saudi Arabia and that the sub-sea line was near completion. "There is no significant delay. The project is on schedule to deliver gas supplies to Abu Dhabi in 2007," Ahmed al-Sayegh, chief executive of Dolphin Energy, told Reuters. Sayegh told an investment conference in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi earlier on Sunday that Qatari gas supplies will start in mid-2007.
"The export pipeline was completed in August, the production platforms are ready and the reception facilities at Taweela are nearly complete," Sayegh said. "Qatari gas under the Dolphin Project will start by summer 2007," he added.
The UAE's energy minister had said in September gas supplies may be slightly delayed to early 2007 he Dolphin gas grid project is the first cross-border gas pipeline in the region and aims to take up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas to the UAE and then later to Oman. Analysts have said they expect the project to proceed and that the Saudi concerns were raised as a manoeuvre to push the UAE to adhere to a border pact. The UAE is seeking to amend the 1974 border agreement, under which it ceded a strip of land linking it and Qatar. Riyadh says it has sovereignty over the waters adjoining the strip while the UAE says it has the maritime rights.
Dolphin Energy is owned 51 percent by Abu Dhabi government-run Mubadala Development Company.
Demand for energy in the UAE has been rising rapidly due to population growth and an economic and construction boom funded by record oil revenues. Abu Dhabi, which holds the majority of the oil wealth of the UAE, has said it plans to increase its natural gas output to 6 billion cubic feet per day by 2008 from 4.5 billion cubic feet.
"Technology was not robust enough six years ago, but today Abu Dhabi can go forward because the technology and prices justify the cost of the investment in sour gas projects," Sayegh told the conference organised by Middle East Economic Digest.