Wednesday 30 August 2017

THREE major oil and gas services companies are competing for a contract to retrofit a processing module on the Pluto offshore production platform off Western Australia.

The workscope covers the detailed design, procurement, fabrication, installation, hook-up, pre-commissioning and commissioning of a 1500-tonne water-handling module to be fitted on the platform, said sources.

The trio competing for the job are Murray & Roberts subsidiary Clough, US company McDermott and French-US giant TechnipFMC.

Sources said the module is likely to be built in Southeast Asia or China.

However, options are being explored with the three bidders around the viability of local fabrication in Western Australia, which has capability and experience particularly with Civmec and AusGroup. There is a state of the art construction yard south of Perth at the Australian Marine Complex.

Little background information is available on the water-handling project. A spokesperson for the Pluto project operator Woodside Petroleum was unable to provide any details.

Sources said it is an attractive project, and will be one of several opportunities expected to arise at the Pluto project in the coming years.

The fixed processing platform sits in about 85 metres of water and receives gas from the Pluto and Xena fields. From there, a 180-kilometre trunkline transports gas to an onshore liquefied natural gas plant with capacity of 4.3 million tonnes per annum.

Woodside has placed the Pluto facility at the centre of a new strategy to boost its LNG business by bringing undeveloped gas discoveries into the plant.

The company is looking at a two-phase expansion that would see the development of its own untapped gas in the Carnarvon basin to generate between 1 million tpa and 1.5 million tpa of LNG, possibly utilising a smaller modularised system.

Chief executive Peter Coleman has described this as a "commoditised" train that can be purchased on the market and "plugged into the plant".

Woodside has an unspecified amount of undeveloped gas in the Greater Pluto area, and plans to drill two new gas exploration wells in the coming year as a means of boosting feedstock volumes for the Pluto expansion.

The Swell-1 exploration well in Block WA-483-P will be drilled in this quarter, while the Ferrand-1 prospect in Block WA-404-P is planned for the second quarter next year.

Block WA-404-P already contains six deep-water discoveries called Martin, Martell, Noblige, Larsen, Larsen Deep and Remy.

Swell and Ferrand are multi-trillion cubic foot gas prospects.

Woodside said recently the Pluto LNG project had successfully completed a cold high-rate trial, which “demonstrated additional capacity in the LNG train and will inform decision-making on expansion options for Pluto LNG”.