RE: CEO interview: Richard Herbert21 Aug 2024 17:18
You’ve talked about a well performance management strategy to address the issue of liquids at Saltfleetby. What is the problem and how do you fix it?
A gas condensate reservoir is one in which everything is in the gaseous state but as the fluids come out of the well, the condensate converts into a liquid under temperature and pressure and therefore you end up with two phases at the surface: natural gas and condensate.
We don’t have a lot of condensate in our reservoirs. The ratio is about 17 barrels of condensate for every million cubic feet of natural gas, which is relatively lean but it means that in the wells as the liquid drops out the wells get plugged with liquid. It’s to do with the flowing pressure and the reservoir pressure. We’re at a stage now where the field is quite mature. Our predecessors produced nearly 65% of the gas that’s possible to produce out of it. We’re trying to produce the tail of the reserves and the pressures have dropped. And we’re having to deal with these liquids affecting the production of the wells. This isn’t something that surprises us. This is something that happens in fields of this age. And it’s one of the reasons why we are in the process of installing a new compressor at the field, what we call the booster compressor, which is a significant capital project for us. It’s a new unit being constructed in the US and delivered to the site in November of this year. And once we put that on, that will help to deal with this problem because we’ll be able to pull harder on the wells as a result of this additional compressor, which means that this liquid loading issue we had will be diminished.
Will that increase the volume of gas that can be produced?
Yes it will. That is our forecast. We’re looking to raise the production from Saltfleetby in a number of ways but the one that we’ve always signalled would be the first would be the installation of this booster compressor.
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