First gas flows from field off Indonesia

Exploration & Production

November 15, 2022, by Melisa Cavcic

A gas field, which is part of a development project covering a cluster of satellite fields located offshore Indonesia, has been brought on stream.

The start of production at the MDA gas field, “the largest gas field of the 3M project in Indonesia,” was announced by China’s CNOOC on Tuesday.

This field is part of the Madura satellite fields – known as the M satellite fields – which are operated by Husky CNOOC Madura Limited (HCML), a joint operating company between CNOOC (40 per cent); Husky Energy (40 per cent), which is owned by Canada’s Cenovus Energy; and SMS Development (20 per cent), a subsidiary of Samudra Energy.

The 3M project, which consists of three gas fields – MDA, MBH and MDK – with a total of nine gas-producing wells, is located approximately 75 kilometres southeast of Madura Island in the Madura Strait, East Java, in an average water depth of around 80 metres.

According to CNOOC, the main production facility is a floating production unit (FPU) called Trunojoyo 01, which will undertake the natural gas production and treatment process. This FPU was constructed in China with a design capacity of 175 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d).

The FPU Trunojoyo 01, which was made for the MDA, MBH and MDK fields in the Madura Strait, has a length of 160 meters and a width of 32 meters. The gas is expected to be exported through the existing 28-inch Indonesia East Java Gas Pipeline (EJGP) to be sold to buyers on the island of Java.

OceanSTAR revealed recently that the hookup of this FPU was completed in September and the first gas was expected in the fourth quarter of 2022.

The MBH gas field started production in October and CNOOC underscores that once the five gas-producing wells from the MDA field are put on stream, the 3M project is expected to reach a peak daily production of approximately 127 MMcf/d.