The Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG) has reported plans for a further expansion to its Tubridgi gas storage facility in northwest Western Australia.
The group has followed its $74-million (Aus.) redevelopment and commissioning of the Tubridgi facility in 2017 with a final investment decision in the last week to complete a seismic survey and expansion of the injection and withdrawal capacity to 90 terajoules/day and 60 terajoules/day, respectively.
Tubridgi is a shallow depleted natural gas field with an aerial extent of 35 sq km originally operated by Doral Resources Ltd. on the coast of Western Australia about 25 km southwest of Onslow. It produced between 1991 and 2004 into the domestic grid via an 85-km spur line into the Dampier-Bunbury trunk line.
Initial plans following the field’s depletion in 2004 were to convert the field into a 42 petajoule storage facility with injection and withdrawal rates of 50 terajoules/day.
The new expansion comes in response to the strong demand in the Western Australian domestic gas market for storage services, according to Andrew Staniford, AGIG’s chief customer officer.
The seismic survey will be state of the art, producing 3D mapping of the reservoir that lies about 550 m underground. The plan is to define the maximum storage volume for customers and derisk any additional wells that may be installed in the future.
The debottlenecking to increase injection and withdrawal capacity has been assessed following a year of operational data and technical input from the in-house engineering team.
The facility, the largest gas storage in Western Australia, is now owned and operated by AGIG, which is an amalgam of Australian Gas Networks, Dampier to Bunbury Pipeline, and Multinet Gas Networks that banded together in 2017.
AGIG has 34,000 km of distribution networks throughout Australia and more than 3,500 km of gas transmission pipelines.