In a public notice in the Taranaki Daily News this week, Greymouth said pipeline construction near the small north Taranaki settlement of Tikorangi started on Monday and would continue until further notice.
Earlier this month Greymouth briefly flared hydrocarbons – believed to be from up to three Eocene-aged Kapuni intervals – at the Turangi-1 wellsite.
The flares were no more than 3m long, indicating either low flow rates of perhaps only 200,000 cubic feet a per day or deliberate choking back of flows.
Crown Minerals requires a prospect to be able to flow hydrocarbons to surface before it will grant a petroleum mining permit. Greymouth has applied for such a permit over nearly all of PEP 38762.
Greymouth completed and cased the Turangi-1 well – its first onshore Taranaki well targeting deep gas (Eocene-aged or older) in mid-2005 but has not revealed any plans for its future.
PEP 38762 lies between the near-shore Pohokura gas-condensate field and the onshore Mangahewa deep gas and McKee oil fields, and is along the same inversion trend as these fields.
Possible markets for Turangi gas could be the nearby recently mothballed Methanex Motunui methanol complex, located in the north-west corner of PEP 38762, or the nearby smaller Waitara Valley plant.
Methanex is restarting the valley plant this week for to take advantage of strengthening global methanol prices (which have increased from US$260 per tonne to US$320 in six months) and to use its remaining Maui gas allocation.
