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Chevron wins approval for Gorgon
Chevron’s giant Gorgon LNG project passed a major hurdle Dec. 12 when the state environmental minister for Western Australia overturned an agency review recommending the development be blocked. The project still needs approval from the federal environmental minister, Ian Campbell, before work can begin.
Chevron and the other Gorgon partners appealed the rejection by the state’s environmental authority last summer. That authority said the project should be halted because it would cause too much disruption of nesting sites for an endangered turtle.
Gorgon pivots on a two-train gas liquefaction plant on Barrow Island. The plant would produce 10 million tonnes of LNG each year. The site is near beaches where the turtles nest.
Mark McGowan, the state’s environmental minister, mandated that the partners spend $47 million to protect the turtle and other species, and ordered strict ecological controls. He said he was confident the turtles wouldn’t be hurt by activities in and around the plant.
Gorgon was originally projected to cost around $11 billion, but is now expected to run at least $15 billion.
Chevron, based in San Ramon, Calif., is the operator with 50 percent of Gorgon. Shell and ExxonMobil each hold a quarter of the project, which is said to hold about 40 trillion cubic feet of gas.
ConocoPhillips hits more gas Meanwhile, there’s a nice new find for ConocoPhillips in the Timor Sea. The company announced Dec. 12 that the Barossa-1 exploration well yielded a gas flow of 30.1 million cubic feet a day through a 56/64-inch choke. Even at that, the flow rate was limited by the capabilities of equipment on the surface. A second interval showed a flow of 800,000 cubic feet per day.
Drilling started in July at Barossa-1 in the Timor Sea about 180 miles northwest of Darwin. It was drilled in 765 feet of water to a total depth of just over 14,000 feet. The well was plugged and abandoned.
Barossa is less than 20 miles from the Caldita-1 well, which showed a similar flow rate in the fall of 2005. Both are within range of the LNG plant at Darwin. Conoco, based in Houston, is now drilling a second Caldita well, and a 3-D seismic survey over both Barossa and Caldita will begin shortly.
Both fields are in a block where operator Conoco has a 60 percent interest and Santos Offshore Pty. Ltd. has 40 percent.
—Allen Baker
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