Page 18 - AsianOil Week 33 2021
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Baker Hughes wins subsea contract for Gorgon compression project
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
OILFIELD services provider Baker Hughes announced this week that it had been awarded a contract to supply subsea compression man- ifold technology for the Jansz-Io Compression (J-IC) project at Chevron’s Gorgon LNG plant in Australia.
Baker Hughes said it would provide Chevron with a subsea compression manifold structure (SCMS) including module and foundation. It will also supply the latest optimised version of its horizontal clamp connector system and subsea controls for the manifold structure.
The technology will be supplied under Baker Hughes’ Subsea Connect business, which is aimed at maximising recovery over the entire lifespan of a field, while reducing the total cost of ownership.
The J-IC project involves a modification of the existing Gorgon LNG project. It will help to improve gas recovery from the Janz-Io field, which supplies the liquefaction plant on Western Australia’s Barrow Island.
The Janz-Io field has been online since 2015 and is expected to face declining reservoir pres- sure after around 10 years in production. This can be rectified through the addition of com- pression infrastructure.
Chevron said in June that the project would involve the installation of roughly 6,500 tonnes of subsea compression infrastructure, as well as a 27,000-tonne normally unattended floating Field Control Station (FCS). A 135-km subma- rine power cable linked to Barrow Island will also be installed.
The project is estimated to cost roughly $4bn, representing Chevron’s largest capital invest- ment in Australia since the approval of Gorgon Stage 2 in 2018. The project is expected to help
keep the three-train 15.6mn tonne per year (tpy) Gorgon LNG plant filled for decades.
Gorgon Stage 2 is now nearing completion of the installation phase, and will see the Gorgon plant supplied from four new Jansz-Io and seven new Gorgon wells.
The J-IC project is anticipated to take around five years to complete.
Gorgon woes
The project follows a string of challenges for Chevron and its partners in Gorgon. Over the past year, each of Gorgon’s three trains has been taken offline in turn for repairs after weld quality issues were discovered on propane heat exchang- ers – or kettles. Chevron said in mid-June that Train 3 was due to re-enter service in the subse- quent weeks.
Separately, Chevron has come under fire for missing carbon capture and storage (CCS) tar- gets at Gorgon. The giant LNG project had been approved on the condition that 100mn tonnes of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would be captured and stored. However, technical chal- lenges delayed the start-up of the CCS facility at Gorgon by three years, and to date, Chevron has only captured 5mn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) since the facility came online in 2019.
Chevron has said it is confident that it could resolve the problems with the $3.1bn facility’s pressure management system. However, the pro- ject is widely viewed as a test case for large-scale CCS technology to accompany oil and gas meg- aprojects, and its struggles thus far could inten- sify opposition to relying on carbon capture in order to allow oil and gas production to continue over the long term.
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 33 19•August•2021
