Brisbane-based CH4 Gas told the Australian Stock Exchange yesterday that 66 wells were now in various stages of production, five were drilled and awaiting completion, and one required a workover.

CH4 said the field was now consistently meeting the Enertrade daily gas nomination of around 40 terajoules per day and was supplying around 3 TJpd to Ergon Energy.

On May 24, the field produced a record 48.4 TJpd of gas and sold a record 46.4 TJ to Enertrade and Ergon.

It was expected the MGP would sell around 16 petajoules of gas to its customers over the next financial year.

CH4 has now completed 189km of directional production “inseam” drilling, 24km of vertical production drilling, six pilot wells and the 72 production wells.

CH4 currently holds a 50% stake in the project, together with BHP Billiton (50%), though CH4 is currently moving to merge with Arrow Energy while BHPB has arranged to sell its stake in the project to AGL.

In conjunction with Anglo Coal, CH4 has also drilled and completed five test wells to drain gas from the Moranbah North Coal Mine in advance of coal operations in the mining area of the MNC lease.

Three of the wells, which were configured as single 1000m lateral, single vertical completions, were now in test phase and producing better than expected gas flows. Production for the three wells totalled 2.65 TJpd of gas (an average of 880 gigajoules per day per well) after only 55 days.

CH4 said discussions were well advanced with Anglo Coal to commercialise production from these wells that lay adjacent to the MGP infrastructure, with a plan to connect them to the MGP gathering and production system.

It was proposed to drill a number of further wells in the MNC mining lease area to degas coal seams in advance of mining and produce the gas into the MGP system.