Offshore staff
PERTH -- Woodside Petroleum will issue its preliminary field development plan shortly for the Greater Sunrise fields in the Timor Sea. The joint venture partners are currently completing final diligence in support of concept selection.
Woodside has also issued an update on its other current development programs offshore Western Australia.
At the Keppel shipyard in Singapore, topside module fabrication is nearing completion for the FPSO Okha for the North West Shelf oil redevelopment project. Woodside has awarded a further contract covering refurbishment of existing NWS subsea infrastructure – offshore installations should start late this year.
At end-March, the Pluto LNG project was almost 87% complete. Despite an eight-day strike in January by workers at the Pluto LNG Park near Karratha, Woodside remains confident of first gas from the Pluto field by the end of this year and first LNG in early 2011.
Hook-up and commissioning work of the Pluto platform continues. Rock dumping is under way over sections of the offshore pipeline between the platform and the onshore site, and this work should be completed shortly. The fifth and final Pluto production well is due to be completed later this year.
Front-end engineering design for Pluto Trains 2 and 3 is progressing to plan, Woodside adds. As for the exploration campaign to find fresh supplies of gas in the area, the first four of six planned wells all delivered discoveries. However, an influx of high pressure gas above the Larsen prospect’s primary target zone prevented the well being deepened to its main objective. Due to mechanical issues with the Maersk Discoverer rig, only top hole sections have been drilled at Larsen Deep and Camus.
Another rig, the Ocean America, is on its way from the Gulf of Mexico to participate in Woodside’s Carnarvon basin exploration program.
4/23/2010
