The new Marlin B platform (right) has allowed the efficient production of the deep Turrum field, part of a three-field project holding an estimated 1.6 trillion cubic feet of gas and 110 million barrels of oil and natural-gas liquids.
Kipper The Kipper field, discovered in 1986, is a joint venture between Esso Australia (operator, 32.5 percent), BHP Billiton (32.5 percent) and Santos Ltd. (35 percent). Gas and gas liquids will be produced through subsea wells tied to the West Tuna platform. Installed close to West Tuna, a smaller, unstaffed satellite platform called the Riser Access Tower links to West Tuna via bridge and connects the Kipper pipelines to West Tuna. Owen notes that rising gas prices in southeastern Australia and supportive government
Standfield, Gippsland projects manager. “The largest gas field in southeastern Australia, Marlin sits atop Turrum, which is more than a mile below the seafloor. Marlin is also typical of the more attractive early Gippsland Basin fields, with its large reserves of cleaner gas, high-pressure reser- voirs and geology dominated by thick marine sands. “Turrum, however, was always going to require significant capital investment. In addition to its higher levels of CO 2 , Turrum’s geology is much more complex. And unlike the shallower fields, its low reservoir pressure would
require offshore compression to produce, which meant the instal- lation of another platform.” Things began to look up for Turrum after the Bass Strait’s larg- est 3-D seismic survey in 2001. “The survey allowed us to get a better picture of the reser- voirs,” Standfield says. “We later combined this information with data from an early-phase drilling program in which we drilled three oil wells and produced them back to the Marlin A platform. This oil production provided valuable data on the reservoir’s performance and characteristics, and helped us develop some of the most sophis-
energy and regulatory policies helped make the KTT project economically feasible. “Credit must also go, however, to the decades-long efforts of Esso and joint-venture scientists and engineers to expand their geoscientific understanding of the Gippsland Basin as well as their ongoing development and application of new technology,” he says. Turrum’s time A case in point is the Turrum field. “Turrum was literally in the shadow of the Marlin field since its discovery in 1966,” says David
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