Petronas sticks on all offshore multi-platforms for K5
The Malaysia national oil company (NOC) Petronas is opting for the all offshore multi-platforms concept to develop the challenging K5 natural gas field in the South China Sea offshore the Sarawak Province in Malaysia.
This decision comes in the same time as the French major company Total has decided to withdraw from the K5 project, leaving Petronas to continue on its own the development of this gas field.
The K5 natural gas field is rather unique as it contain 70% of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Usually with such a rate of CO2, no gas field has a chance to become commercially viable.
But the size of the field and the economical dependence of the Malaysian economy on the gas exploration and production has motivated Petronas to investigate all potential solutions to develop these gas fields with high content of CO2.
According to Petronas exploration, the Malaysian waters count 15 of these gas fields with a high percentage of CO2.
These fields hold more than 13.2 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas and twice more of carbon dioxide.
Therefore the challenge for the operator relies not only in separating the CO2 from the natural gas and condensate, but also to find the best use of the CO2.
In this case, the CO2 may be a valuable resource to boost the production of depleting crude oil fields such as the Block SK-8, Jintan and Seria 50 kilometers from Bintulu LNG plant.
If the idea looks simple and attractive, the solution from the CO2 separation on the gas fields to its injection in the oil fields rise many questions because of the quantities to be treated and the distance between the respective fields.
Petronas and Twister to run CO2 separation pilot in K5
In this context, Petronas and Total had signed in March 2012 a Heads of Agreement (HOA) to start the conceptual study to compare a conventional onshore solution with an offshore solution.
The onshore solution should only use offshore platforms for the production that would feed through export pipeline an onshore gas central processing facility (CPF) to be located adjacent to the Bintulu liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant.
In this scenario the CO2 should be exported by subsea pipelines to the crude oil fields for injection.
From process perspective this onshore solution is simple, but requires long distance pipelines that load the project capital expenditure.
Instead, the offshore solution is based on a set of platforms including a gas central processing platform (CPP) to export directly the gas to Bintulu and the CO2 to the oil fields.
The offshore solution offers significant costs advantage but increase the size of the topsides, up to 100,000 tonnes, and the risk related to the technology required for the CO2 separation and handling up to injection.
While opting for the offshore solution, Total decided to withdraw from the K5 project.
To support this decision Petronas goes for a pilot project designed by Twister from The Netherlands to separate the CO2 from the natural gas.
This test should run until 2015 and Petronas will launch in following the call for tender for the competitive front end engineering and design (FEED) for K5.
In this new configuration the FEED work should cover:
– Five offshore platforms including, two wellheads, the CPP, and two compression platforms
– Gas export pipeline to Bintulu LNG Plant
– CO2 export pipelines to Block SK-8, Jintan and Seria oil fields
With a competitive FEED starting in 2015, Petronas is now targeting the first operations in K5 with this all offshore multi-platforms solution by 2020.