Laverda to contain 100 million barrels deep offshore WA
Woodside Petroleum (Woodside) from Australia and Mitsui Oil Exploration Co, Ltd (Mitsui) have decided to move ahead in the development of the Laverda oil field in respect with the promising conclusions of the last appraisal drilling operations.
In Laverda the both partners share working interests so that:
– Woodside 60% and is the operator
– Mitsui 40%
The Laverda oil field is located in block WA-36-R offshore the North West Cape, at 50 kilometer distance from Exmouth, Western Australia.
Laverda reserves lies by 800 meters depth of water and total 2300 meters deep in the Exmouth sub-basin.
The Laverda oil field was discovered in year 2000, followed by an appraisal program, including both seismic and wells, in 2010.
Woodside drilled appraisal wells at Laverda North-1 and Laverda North-2 to hit oil at the Macedon level.
First Laverda finds were then confirmed by an additional appraisal well at Laverda East-1.
Preliminary evaluation is progressing and Woodside suggests that the combined volumes of the Greater Laverda area have the potential to contain a recoverable reserves in excess of 100 million barrel of oil equivalent (BOE).
With these quantities, Woodside and Mitsui have decided to move on the conceptual study while proceeding to additional work to confirm the ultimate size of Laverda accumulations.
Conceptual design contest against Laverda FPSO
Historically Wooside has a long standing experience of building and operating floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels with previous FPSOs on Cossak-Wanaea, Enfield, Laminaria-Coralina and Vincent fields.
In this context, Woodside had announced on the early days of the Laverda project that it should be developed also around a FPSO.
IntecSea Engineering performed immediately some pre-study based on this FPSO concept.
But since Woodside appointed Mr Robert Edwardes from ExxonMobil as new Development Executive Vice President, the Laverda deep water project comes right on time to investigate alternative solution to FPSO .
To do so, Woodside will open a conceptual design contest to consider all options:
– Semi-submersible production platform
– Tension Leg Platform (TLP)
– Single Point of Anchor Reservoir (SPAR)
On this new base, Woodside will invite engineering companies to submit a conceptual study using cutting edge offshore technologies.
Aker Solutions, Floatec, Modec, SBM Offshore, Technip and Wison Offshore are among the deep offshore specialists to be interested in proposing advanced solutions to Woodside and Mitsui to develop the Laverda deep offshore oil field.
