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The Mackenzie gas line numbers game More studies grapple with initial marketable gas resources available for a pipeline from Canada’s Arctic; anchor fields rated at 5.8 tcf Gary Park Petroleum News Canadian Contributing Writer
One of the imponderables of the Mackenzie Gas Project will come under growing scrutiny as the venture enters the regulatory hearing process in late January.
For now, getting a fix on the reserves that are available from the Mackenzie Delta, Beaufort Sea, Colville Hills in the Central Mackenzie Valley and even the Yukon’s Eagle Plains to back the C$6.9 billion undertaking — based on 2003 dollars and Imperial Oil’s latest calculations — is as varied as the responses.
The latest round of filings with the National Energy Board does little to achieve consensus.
Various petroleum engineering consultants turned in varying assessments of the ultimate initial marketable gas resources — but they were all responding to different instructions. Anchor fields number constant The one number that seems to remain fairly constant is the 5.8 trillion cubic feet assigned to the three anchor onshore Delta discoveries — Imperial’s Taglu 3 tcf, Parsons Lake 1.8 tcf shared by ConocoPhillips Canada 75 percent and ExxonMobil Canada 25 percent and Shell Canada’s Niglintak 1 tcf.
Even then the consulting firm of Gilbert Laustsen Jung Associates has disagreed slightly by estimating the recoverable marketable gas at 5.69 tcf from original gas in place of 8.273 tcf.
A GLJ study estimates ultimate resources of 21 tcf of initial marketable gas in the Mackenzie-Beaufort region and 3 tcf at Colville Hills.
The breakdown of discovered resources puts the Mackenzie-Beaufort at 10.3 tcf, Colville Hills at 400 billion cubic feet and Eagle Plains at 100 billion cubic feet. It excluded 600 billion cubic feet of discovered initial marketable gas in the deepwater Beaufort.
The production forecasts were based on a period ending in 2054. GLJ hired by anchor gas owners GLJ was hired by the anchor gas owners to establish that there is sufficient gas to support initial shipments of 820 million cubic feet per day by the producers, with another 400 million cubic feet per day coming from other producers to cover a one-third equity stake by the Aboriginal Pipeline Group.
Sproule Associates, in a study commissioned by the Mackenzie Explorer Group — made up of companies expected to be the source of gas for the aboriginal group — calculated the marketable resources that might ultimately be available for a Mackenzie pipeline at 67.9 tcf, of which it said 11.5 tcf has been discovered.
Sproule projects that the Mackenzie-Beaufort has 56.7 tcf of ultimate initial marketable gas onshore and offshore, of which 10.9 tcf is discovered and 4.2 tcf at Colville Hills, of which 500 billion cubic feet is discovered.
That study estimates there could be a further 7 tcf in the Yukon and Mackenzie Valley, of which only 100 bcf has been discovered in Eagle Plains. Sproule: 1.7 bcf per day for 20 years Dealing only with resources that represent primary supplies for the Mackenzie pipeline, Sproule said onshore resources alone should be able to support a pipeline capable of carrying 1.7 bcf per day for more than 20 years.
The Sproule base case also said that by removing constraints on pipeline size to handle undiscovered resources, initial sales gas volumes of 1.1 bcf per day should be able to grow over 10 years to 2.5 bcf per day and hold that level for 10 years without having to develop higher-risk, deeper-water Beaufort plays.
A study by Cizek Environmental Services for the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, based on the Sproule and GLJ work, forecasts the three anchor fields could be able to deliver 1.2 bcf per day for 14 years and 1.8 bcf per day for 9 years, suggesting that the pipeline would need connections to other existing and undiscovered fields to keep it operating at capacity for 50 years.
Cizek said that a pipeline capacity of 1.8 bcf per day and total sales gas of 22.81 tcf would require 44 discovered fields.
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