Auckland-headquartered Greymouth announced on Monday that first gas was now flowing from Turangi into the nearby Maui pipeline, almost exactly a year to the day since open access provisions for third party carriers were finalised for New Zealand’s largest and most strategic pipeline.
Greymouth chief operating officer John Sturgess said Greymouth was the first non-Maui partner to deliver on an interconnection agreement for gas transportation on the Maui pipeline.
Before October 1, 2005, gas purely from the offshore Taranaki Maui field – owned by Shell New Zealand, Todd Energy and Austrian firm OMV – was admitted to the pipeline.
Since then, three new interconnection agreements have been executed for Taranaki gas transported in the Maui pipeline that runs from Oaonui in Taranaki north to Huntly in Waikato.
These cover Shell and OMV’s shares of gas from the recently commissioned near-shore Pohokura field, Todd’s share of Pohokura gas, and Todd’s onshore McKee and Mangahewa fields. Todd is taking its share of Pohokura gas and liquids separately from that of Shell-OMV.
Sturgess yesterday said Greymouth had fast-tracked the development of Turangi so gas reserves from the PMP 38161 lease could be made available to maintain “fairly priced” fuel supplies to residential and backbone NZ gas users in all industry sectors.
Greymouth announced the commerciality of the Turangi-1 well, drilled in 2005, in May. The well encountered multiple Eocene-aged Kapuni group sands and testing confirmed the discovery of a sizeable condensate-rich gas field.
The company said then that independent assessment of proven and probable (2P) reserves for the Turangi and Ohanga areas of PMP 38161 were 154 petajoules of gas and 5.1 million barrels of condensate.
At that time, Sturgess said Greymouth expected initial delivery rates of about 10 terajoules per day of export-specification Turangi gas. He also said the Turangi project would involve co-developing Ohanga gas and future long-term gas cycling in the richer sand sequences was possible.
Sturgess was unavailable for further comment on customers or first flow rates for Turangi gas, but a company spokesperson said the capacity of the link-in pipeline (to the Maui system) exceeded 50TJd, leaving plenty of spare capacity for more gas to be produced.
