Monday, 7 January 2013

Oil & Gas Sector - First high CO2 field in the pipeline OVERWEIGHT


- Upstream reported that Petroliam Nasional (Petronas) has floated a tender for a parallel conceptual study to be carried out on a multi-billion dollar K5 high carbon dioxide gas development off Sarawak which is being carried out jointly with France-based Total. Petronas and Total teamed up on a 15-month joint study last March to evaluate the carbon dioxide removal, injection and sequestration technologies available to commercially develop the K5 sour gas field.

- The project partners are understood to have started internal studies on a proposal to bring the K5 gas to an onshore facility near the Bintulu liquefied natural gas plant for processing. Treated gas will be sent to the Bintulu LNG facility, while carbon dioxide will be re-exported offshore for injection into a mature oilfield to enhance recovery rates. The onshore solution involves transporting carbon dioxide over a long distance to the designated oilfield for re-injection.

- Petronas was reported to have requested for a second proposal involving offshore platforms to be constructed and installed to process, separate and compress the gas and carbon dioxide from the K5 field. Four Petronas-licensed engineering contractors – Aker Solutions, Ranhill Worley, Technip and Wood Group Mustang – were invited to submit bids before the end of 2012 for a conceptual study on the offshore development option. The offshore development concept currently includes a central processing platform, two gas compression platforms and two wellhead platforms. The contract is expected to be awarded in 1Q2013 and the successful bidder will carry out early engineering work on the offshore option. 

- K5 is the largest of 15 high carbon dioxide gas fields flagged up as potential sources of carbon dioxide supplies for enhanced oil recovery projects in Malaysia under a 2006 Petronas study, which had identified 10 fields with a combined 3.6 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas resources net of carbon dioxide off Peninsular Malaysia and five others with more than 9.6 Tcf of recoverable gas resources off Sarawak. The 15 fields potentially hold 27.3 Tcf of carbon dioxide, which the study proposes to be extracted for re-injection into mature oilfields to boost recovery rates. Despite its 70% carbon dioxide content, K5 tops the list of 15 fields in development potential with its multi-trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas resources.

- While the development plan for K5 is still being drawn up, industry sources expect the total capital expenditure for the high carbon dioxide project to be more than US$2 bil. Petronas is also expected to follow up with a front-end engineering and design competition for K5 once the development concept has been finalised. The K5 contest is also likely to be extended to international contractors. 

- We understand that the award of the RM8bil Pan-Malaysian umbrella tender for hook-up, construction and commissioning (HUCC) works could be temporarily deferred from end-2012 towards the end of 1Q2013 to 2Q2013.Likewise, the rollout of new fabrication contracts, which temporarily slowed down in 2H2012, will start to regain momentum from 2Q2013 onwards with up to 10 large central processing platforms expected to be awarded this year against the backdrop of Petronas’ capital expenditure programme of RM300mil from 2011-2015. With the pent-up spending binge in the pipeline, we maintain our OVERWEIGHT call on the sector with BUY calls for SapuraKencana Petroleum, Dialog Group and Bumi Armada.   

Source: AmeSecurities

No comments:

Post a Comment