Woodside brings Persephone online

Australian energy company Woodside has brought online its Persephone project offshore Western Australia. 

The Persephone gas field is located in production license WA-1-L, some 135 km north west of Karratha, in a water depth of around 126 meters.

The project was completed six months ahead of schedule. Woodside is the operator of the project with BP, BHP, Chevron, Shell, Woodside and Mitsubishi-Mitsui as partners, each with 16.67% interest.

BP confirmed on Monday the start of production from another two of the seven upstream major projects that it expected to come online in 2017, Juniper offshore Trinidad and Persephone offshore Australia. Five of these seven projects have now started up, BP said.

According to BP, the Persephone project came on-stream on July 30.

Juniper and Persephone follow the start-ups earlier this year of the first phase of the West Nile Delta development in Egypt, the Trinidad Onshore Compression project and the Quad 204 redevelopment in the UK. A further two projects – the first phase of the Khazzan tight gas development in Oman and development of the Zohr gas field offshore Egypt – are expected to begin production before the end of the year, BP said.

The A$1.2 billion Persephone project, approved in 2014, consists of two wells tied into a subsea production manifold via a seven-kilometer subsea tie-back with production fluids transported to the existing North Rankin Complex (NRC), part of the large North West Shelf project.

The field was discovered in 2006 via exploration well Persephone-1, located 8 kilometers northeast of the North Rankin Complex.

The NRC, which will take gas from the Persephone, consists of the interconnected North Rankin A (NRA) and North Rankin B (NRB) platforms and associated subsea infrastructure, including two export trunklines which run between NRC and the onshore Karratha Gas Plant (KGP).

At peak production the project is expected to produce around 48 mmscfd of gas net for BP.