The New Plymouth District Council has approved NGC’s NZ$8 million plans to construct, own and operate a separation plant - to process the Kahili raw wellstream products - and pipelines - to link Kahili gas into existing NGC infrastructure.

NGC has now started earthworks on the separator plant site about 15km east of Inglewood, with mechanical construction expected to start in early May. Work on the pipelines began in early March and is now over 60% complete. The pipelines are scheduled for completion by the end of May, and the separator plant by the end of July.

The condensate, which will be owned by the Kahili partners, will be transported by road tanker to the Omata tank farm for export from New Plymouth; while the separated gas will be transported to NGC’s existing pipeline system and go to NGC’s Kapuni gas treatment plant for further processing. The Kahili separator plant will be operated by NGC personnel from Kapuni.

The Kahili field is operated by Austral Pacific Energy and present recoverable gas reserves from the Kahili-1B discovery well are approximately 5 Petajoules.

NGC has access rights to a proportion of Kahili gas under last year’s NZ$2 million prepayment arrangement between Austral and NGC.