Eni Australia has submitted environmental plans for a third production well on its wholly owned Blacktip gas and condensate field in the shallow waters of the southern Bonaparte Gulf offshore Northern Territory. The plans were submitted to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority.
Blacktip, discovered in 2001, was brought on stream in 2009. The existing development comprises a fixed steel four-leg unmanned platform and two production wells connected to a subsea pipeline transporting gas and condensate to an onshore processing facility at Wadeye on the Northern Territory coast west of Darwin. Wadeye is connected by an onshore pipeline to the main Northern Territory grid.
The Wadeye facility consists of gas separation, dehydration, and compression equipment along with storage tanks for the condensate, which is periodically offloaded to seagoing tankers via an offloading buoy 7 km offshore.
Blacktip initial reserves were estimated at 150 million boe contained in stacked reservoirs of Lower Triassic and Permo-Carboniferous age.