US firm KBR won a contract to work on a natural gas liquids project at Saudi's Shaybah oilfield, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The award comes just a few days after after Canada's SNC-Lavalin won another deal for gas work from state oil firm Saudi Aramco. Aramco is focusing on expanding gas output as it looks to meet rising domestic demand from power plants and the petrochemical industry.

Neither SNC-Lavalin nor KBR gave the value of their respective contracts but industry sources said the combined value was around $100 million.

KBR plans to start work on the Shaybah projects in October. The contract is for engineering and design work as well as project management, it said it in the statement. KBR did not provide details about the Shaybah programme.

Industry sources said the three main projects cover a new natural gas liquids (NGL) recovery facility, debottlenecking gas-oil separation plants and the installation of facilities at the Berri gas plant to separate NGLs from gas.

The deal is the latest in KBR's Saudi portfolio. It is also working on Aramco's giant petrochemical complex with Dow Chemical and on Aramco's Yanbu refinery with  ConocoPhillips.

SNC-Lavalin said last week that it would provide engineering and design work and project management services for the Wasit gas development programme at Moneefa. Work there would start in October, the company said.

That project would provide for the production and processing of up to 2.5 billion cubic feet per day of gas from the Arabiyah and Hasbah offshore non-associated sour gas fields to help meet future Saudi demand, it said in the statement.

Wasit is split into several projects that include building gas processing facilities, two offshore gas platforms, one tie-in platform to handle around 1 billion cfd of gas, subsea power and communication links and pipelines. Jacobs Engineering, Technip, Foster Wheeler, Fluor Corp and Worley Parsons also submitted bids for the deals.-Reuters