Page 13 - Euroil Week 43 2019

EurOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES EurOil
Spirit Boosts Output at Chiswick
UK
Spirit has added 258mcm to GMA’s annual output.
UK operator Spirit Energy has ramped up pro- duction at its Chiswick field in the southern North Sea, following a GBP68.5mn ($88.2mn) drilling campaign.
Spirit brought on stream a new well at Chiswick in July, adding an extra 25mn cubic feet per day (258mn cubic metres per year) to its output.
Chiswick is one of several fields in Spirit’s Greater Markham Area (GMA) straddling UK and Dutch waters, which also includes Markham, Grove and Kew. Completion of the new well has brought overall production from GMA to 517mn cubic metres per year, which Spirit noted was enough to heat 427,000 UK homes.
“The Greater Markham Area is an important part of our business, and so our team has spent a lot of time looking for opportunities to build on these fields and add further production,” Spirit’s director for North Sea operated assets, Girish Kabra, said in a statement on October 29. “Data from the newly drilled C5 well will help to screen furthernewopportunitiesintheChiswickfield.”
As part of its development programme at
Chiswick, Spirit will also deploy the Noble Hans Deul jack-up rig on hire from UK contractor Noble to work on the field’s C4, resulting in a further production lift.
The announcement comes after Spirit reported earlier this month it would invest GBP140mn at its Chestnut field, located 200 km northeast of Aberdeen, to extend its production life until 2023. It will begin drilling a fourth pro- duction well at the site before the end of the year.
Chestnut, where Spirit is partnered with South Korea’s Dan Petroleum, came online in 2008 and was initially expected to flow only 7mn barrels of oil within two years. It can since yielded more than 24mn barrels.
Spirit also operates in Danish and Norwegian waters. The company, launched in December 2017 as a result of a merger between UK Cen- trica’s production business and Germany’s Bay- erngas Norge, produced 46.8mn barrels of oil equivalent last year. Despite Spirit’s strong finan- cial performance – it earned almost $644mn in profit last year – Centrica is looking to sell its stake in the company by the end of next year to pay off its debts. ™
Wintershall researches hydrogen production from gas
GERMANY
Wintershall estimates that Europe could cut its C02 emissions by 60mn tonnes per year by adding hydrogen to its gas grid.
GERMAN gas company Wintershall Dea has teamed up with the Karlsruhe Institute of Tech- nology (KIT) to carry out groundwork for the industrial production of hydrogen from natural gas.
As nations across the world take tougher steps to address climate change, hydrogen is gaining ground as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels. There are several ways of produc- ing the element, but many oil and gas compa- nies are advocating for its separation from gas through a process known as methane pyrolysis.
Wintershall reported on October 29 it had signed a co-operation agreement with KIT on researching the environmentally clean way of extracting hydrogen from gas using the tech- nique. Pyrolysis not only produces gaseous hydrogen that can be used as a CO2-free energy source but also solid carbon that can be used in industry or placed in storage.
“The perspectives we’re creating as part of our cooperation with KIT show that natural gas is fit for the future,” Wintershall’s chief technol- ogy officer Hugo Dijkgraaf explained. “Natural
gas is already the cleanest conventional source of energy. Yet it can become even more cli- mate-friendly moving ahead if we separate off the hydrogen and the carbon contained it.”
Steam reforming is another way of stripping hydrogen from gas, the company said.
According to Wintershall, by mixing hydro- gen with gas in Europe’s gas grid so that it makes up 20% of the content, the continent could cut its CO2 emissions by 60mn tonnes per year – the same amount the whole of Denmark currently emits.
“There are huge quantities of natural gas worldwide and it can be used in a climate-neu- tral way,” Thomas Wetzel, a professor of process engineering at KIT, said. “Our joint project aims to investigate how we can achieve that in a tech- nically efficient manner and use the results later for processing large quantities of gas.”
KIT has already carried out basic research on methane pyrolysis based on liquid metal technology through a joint project with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam.™
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