The WA-286-P joint venture will develop the Cliff Head oil field offshore Western Australia, subject to receipt of final government approvals. First oil is expected to flow within 12 months at an initial rate in excess of 10,000 b/d through facilities with 15,000 b/d capacity.
Proven and probable field reserves, in the fully appraised part of the Cliff Head structure, are estimated to be about 14 MMbbl. There is upside reserve potential in areas adjacent to the field, which are currently un-drilled, but will be accessible from the production platform. The total development cost is expected to be A$227 million.
The Cliff Head Development Project represents a number of firsts for Australia's offshore oil and gas industry, including the first oil field to be developed in the offshore Perth basin.
The Cliff Head oil field development project has four main components:
a small, normally unmanned, offshore platform with seven active wells. Five are oil producers and two are water injectors. It will also have two spare slots to allow for the drilling of future wells. The platform will be in 18 m of water, 11 km from the coast and 14 km from an onshore processing plant at Arrowsmith.
The first of the five oil producing wells, Cliff Head-6, was drilled to total depth and cased last week and has been suspended for future production. TheEnsco 56 jackup drilling rig will be released later today or tomorrow, subject to weather. The rig will then move to the Hadda 1 exploration well in WA-327-P 100 km north of Cliff Head oil field.
Two 14 km 250 mm pipelines, plus umbilicals, will link the platform to the onshore processing plant. One pipeline will transport oil from the platform to the plant. The other pipeline will transport produced water from the plant to the platform for re-injection into the reservoir. The pipelines and umbilicals will be installed by using directional drilling techniques under the beach.
A processing plant will be constructed at Arrowsmith on a site formerly occupied by a lime plant. The Arrowsmith Plant will provide crude oil stabilization and separation facilities and also water injection pumping capability. The oil will be trucked 350 km from the Arrowsmith plant to the BP oil refinery at Kwinana, south of Perth.
The drilling of the four remaining producing wells and two water injection wells represents approximately 30% of the capital cost of the project. All producing wells will be highly deviated, with three currently planned as horizontal wells. Ensco Australia Pty Ltd. will supply theEnsco 67 jackup drilling rig for some of this work.
Day-to-day management of the construction and installation phase of the Cliff Head Development Project will be based in ROC's Perth office where a project team, lead by Duncan Mitchell, was established in 2004 during the front-end engineering and design stage of the project. The drilling and completion component of the project will be managed out of ROC's Sydney office.
The WA-286-P joint venture includes:
Roc Oil (WA) Pty Ltd. (operator) 37.5%
AWE Oil (Western Australia) Pty Ltd. 27.5%
Wandoo Petroleum Pty Ltd. 24%
Voyager (PB) Ltd. 6%
CIECO Exploration and Production (Australia) Pty Ltd. 5%
03/14/05
