Total owns 37.75% interest in the project, while Sonatrach and Cepsa hold 51% and 11.25% interests respectively.

Development work should begin in the fourth quarter of the year, with first gas scheduled for 2013. Timimoun is expected to commercially produce around 1.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year (160 millions cubic feet per day) at plateau.

Total, Sonatrach and Cepsa Group will jointly operate the Timimoun project. The development plan entails drilling around 40 wells to tap eight structures over an area of 2,500 square kilometers. It also includes the construction of gas gathering and processing facilities, as well as a connection to the pipeline that Sonatrach has been called to develop to carry gas from fields in southwestern Algeria to Hassi R’Mel.

Under the marketing agreement, Sonatrach will market all the gas produced.

The Timimoun development project consolidates the long-standing cooperation between Total and Sonatrach in the upstream.