10 March 2014, News Wires – Processing of associated gas from Tullow Oil’s Jubilee oilfield off Ghana is likely to start in the third quarter with construction of a new onshore gas plant set for completion by the end of this month, according to the head of the state oil company.
Field partners recently applied for a waiver of current legal restrictions on flaring of gas produced from the field that is now being re-injected into the reservoir while pipelines are laid to the gas processing facility being built by Sinopec at Atuabo in the West African country’s Western Region.
It is understood that operator Tullow and partners Kosmos Energy and Anadarko Petroleum are concerned delays in completing the gas infrastructure pose a risk to oil wells and the field’s Kwame Nkrumah floating production, storage and offloading vessel as they are unable to contain more associated gas.
The 1.2 billion-barrel oilfield, which started production in late 2010, also holds an estimated 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Construction work on the $700 million gas plant, originally scheduled to be completed last year, has been delayed because of financial and technical issues.
However, state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corporation’s (GNPC) acting chief executive Alex Mould was reported as saying by Reuters on Monday: “Mechanical completion is expected by the end of this month… then commissioning may take up to three months. So we believe that somewhere in the third quarter, it (gas processing) should happen.”
Mould said the plant would ramp up to a maximum 150 million cubic feet per day of gas, most of which would be fed into the Takoradi power plant farther east for power generation.
The new onshore facility is part of the wider Western Corridor Gas Infrastructure Project that has been hit by years of delays.
– Upstream