New $2.5m oil facility

Curtin University and Woodside Petroleum Ltd have teamed up to develop a $2.5 million research facility designed to improve the extraction of oil and gas from deepwater reserves.

The research reflects the oil and gas industry’s increased focus on deepwater reserves, which provide most of the major future opportunities.

The deepwater fields are typically a long distance from land and also present greater engineering challenges.

The deepest oilfield development undertaken in Australia is BHP Billiton’s Stybarrow field, located at a water depth of 825 metres.

BHP’s proposed Scarborough gas field development is even more challenging; the field is at a depth of 900 metres and is 280 kilometres offshore.

Woodside’s Browse basin development, centred on the Brecknock and Torosa fields, is at a water depth of up to 800 metres.

In contrast, most of the North West Shelf fields currently operated by Woodside are about 100 metres in depth, while the Cliff Head oil field off the coast near Dongara is at a depth of just 19 metres.  

Professor Robert Amin, chair of the Woodside Research Facility at Curtin, will lead research at the new facility, which is focused on pioneering the technology needed to cost-effectively transport well-stream oil and gas to a platform or to onshore processing plants and to deal with flow assurance problems.

The new research facility is the first of its scale within the Asia Pacific region.

Woodside’s director enterprise capability, Keith Spence, said the new facility would provide a platform for Curtin’s continued leading edge research into natural gas hydrates and flow assurance.

He said it would also support more near term endeavours such as testing new flow meters and flow assurance chemicals.