An emerging Perth-based sub-sea engineering and offshore services company is on the verge of a major breakthrough in the booming international oil and gas sector.
An emerging Perth-based sub-sea engineering and offshore services company is on the verge of a major breakthrough in the booming international oil and gas sector.
Seatrac Pty Ltd, of Jandakot, has just been awarded a $1,603,800 commercial ready grant, one of the first ever issued by the Federal Government, to develop its sub-sea well intervention system for installing, repairing and gathering data from offshore oil and gas wells.
The key to this $6 million project is that it utilises standard wireline technology deployed from easily sourced standard work vessels, typically in the 65 to 85 metre range, to access wells in water up to 500 metres deep.
Currently this work is carried out in Australia by much larger and more expensive drilling rigs that, in the current climate, are in increasingly short supply with wait times up to nine months or longer.
All the research and development work has been completed and the company is in the midst of a $2.5 million capital raising program to build the first system and deliver it to market by June next year.
Seatrac co-founder and managing director Jon Edwards says the system allowed a sub sea lubricator, essentially a pressure control device that connects to a gas or oil production tree on the sea floor, to be operated from a range of much smaller vessels than those currently used.
The innovation is in the nine-metre high frame, which supports and houses the lubricator, and can be easily installed onto a vessel of choice.
There are about nine sub-sea intervention systems in use around the world, but none developed in Western Australia for Australian conditions.
Mr Edwards says the Seatrac system is more adaptable to a wider range of sub-sea wells than other units, with the market for such a product, particularly in WA, sporadic but growing.
Mr Edwards and Jeff Burns established Seatrac in 2000 as a sub-sea engineering and offshore services company for the oil and gas sector.
The company employs 25 people, including 10 engineers, about half of whom are working on the development and commercialisation of the sub-sea well intervention system.
“The rest are out in the field making money,” Mr Edwards said.
Seatrac already has runs on the board, having developed the ‘AXE’, a high-pressure water abrasive cutting system designed to cut off redundant well heads on the sea floor.
The AXE has already been used successfully in India and under a Clough Engineering contract to dismantle Nixon Energy’s Buffalo platform in the Timor Sea. It was used to cut off five seabed well heads and the three legs of the platform.
Another Federal Government grant has been awarded to publicly listed QRSciences Holdings, which is developing an advanced explosives detection system for airport baggage screeners.
The company picked up $2.8 million under the federal R&D Start Program.
QRSciences Holdings is a world leader in quadruple resonance applications, a technology that uses non-invasive radio waves to identify and detect a wide range of compounds.
The technology has a broad range of applications, including the detection of explosives, narcotics and biochemical substances; pharmaceutical quality control and assurance; mineral and material assay; lab instrumentation and other environmental science applications.
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said QRSciences’ technology offered a cost-effective solution to some of the limitations offered by X-ray machines, was accurate, film-safe, had a low false-alarm rate and required no operator interpretation.
