Saudi Aramco plans to nearly double the capacity of a planned new gas plant at Fadhili to 2.5 billion standard cubic feet per day (scfd), three industry sources said on Monday.

The Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco, in an emailed-response to Reuters, declined to comment. The project is still in the design phase.

The plant in eastern Saudi Arabia was originally scheduled to process 1.5 billion scfd of sour gas from the Khursaniyah and Hasbah fields.

The increase will come from the Hasbah offshore gas field which contains high levels of hydrogen sulphide, nitrogen and CO2.

Gas with high levels of sulphur, also called sour gas, is tougher to process.

Hasbah will feed another gas plant, Wasit, which is still under construction and is expected to start partially in the first quarter of 2015.

The Fadhili gas plant is due to be in operation by the third quarter of 2018, one of the sources said.

Saudi Arabia will double its natural gas output by 2030 but plans to keep all of it at home to fuel domestic growth, Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said earlier this month.

Aramco plans to develop new gas fields not associated with oil production and is already raising its gas system output to 9.6 bln scfd by the end of 2016.

It has plans to invest $3 billion on unconventional gas which it says will help meet its domestic demand for power generation and water desalination and help it free more oil for export.-Reuters