Page 13 - AfrOil Week 32 2021

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While the plant was idle, it explained, Sonatrach’s Arzew LNG facility sent some of the volumes produced by its own three trains to buyers wait- ing for fuel from Skikda LNG.
The Algerian NOC had said in a statement in June that the shutdown was necessary because of technical problems. “A technical issue occurred on June 11 at the Skikda LNG complex and led to the shutdown of this complex,” it said. It described the problem as “a sudden failure of a gas turbine control mechanism” but did not elaborate.
The Skikda plant, located on Algeria’s north- ern coast, processes gas from the Hassi R’Mel fields and is capable of turning out 4mn tonnes per year (tpy) of LNG.
It remained off line for more than half of 2020, powering down in January for a sched- uled two-month maintenance programme and then extending the closure until July following the discovery of damage to one of the plant’s 14 turbines in February.
Sonatrach opted last year to repair the tur- bine rather than replace it, as the replacement process would have kept the Skikda facility out
The latest shutdown at Skikda stemmed from technical problems (Photo: Altrad)
of production for 18 months.
It also sought to compensate for the loss of
the plant’s capacity by increasing the volume of LNG exported from the Arzew plant. Even so, the extension of the maintenance programme caused Algeria’s LNG exports to drop to 10.9mn tonnes in 2020, equivalent to just 43% of the 25.3 tpy operational export capacity of the Skikda and Arzew plants. ™
Trident Energy finishes first of three infill wells at Block G
EQUATORIAL GUINEA
TRIDENT Energy (UK) and its partners in Block G, a licence area offshore Equatorial Guinea, have wrapped up drilling work on the first of three infill wells slated for drilling at the Okume complex.
Panoro Energy (Norway), a non-operat- ing partner in the Block G project, said earlier this week that the first infill well had encoun- tered high-quality reservoir sands that are satu- rated with crude oil. Trident has already begun hook-up procedures for the well, it added, and has moved its rig to the site of the second infill well. Work is due to begin on the second well in the near future, and the partners aim to finish all three infill wells in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The wells are being drilled within the frame- work of an upgrade project that will increase the field’s power, water-injection and gas-lifting capacity. These improvements, in turn, will help de-bottleneck the field’s production facilities.
Once the upgrade project is finished, Panoro said, Trident and its partners will proceed with the conversion of electrical submersible pumps (ESPs) at the site. They completed the first ESP conversion in April of this year and are now waiting to do the same for several additional pumps.
The Okume complex contains five of the six oilfields lying within Block G, which saw
Block G contains six fields, with five in the Okume complex (Image: Kosmos Energy)
production levels average 29,100 barrels per day (bpd) in second quarter of 2021. These fields – Akom North, Ebano, Elon, Okume and Oveng – were discovered in 2001-2002 and are now supporting 32 active development wells and 12 water-injection wells. Trident is using four fixed-field jackets to extract crude from Elon and has installed two tension-leg platforms to develop the other sections of the complex. All of the fields are linked via tie-backs to a central processing facility (CPF) at Elon.
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