Tubridgi gas storage to expand
WA’s biggest gas storage facility - Tubridgi - is expanding less than a year into operation as it fills with surplus gas bought by Citic Pacific.
This story was originally published in The West Australian on 23 March 2018 with the headline "Gas store expands to meet demand." © Peter Milne.
WA’s biggest gas storage facility is expanding less than a year into operation as it fills with surplus gas bought by Citic Pacific.
The Tubridgi facility uses an old gas reservoir south-west of Onslow that the Australian Gas Industry Group, owner of the Dampier to Bunbury gas pipeline, bought from BHP. Gas storage started about nine months ago after $74 million of works had been completed.
AGIG commercial manager Jon Cleary said Tubridgi could store 42,000 terajoules of gas that could be injected or withdrawn at a rate of 50 TJ a day. The storage is equivalent to about 40 days of WA’s annual domestic gas production, and the withdrawal rate is about 5 per cent of daily production.
AGIG plans to expand the withdrawal rate to 60TJ/d and the injection rate to 90TJ/d.
Mr Cleary told the Australian Institute of Energy on Wednesday night that foundation customer Citic Pacific secured 32,000 TJ of storage and about half the rest was contracted.
“CP came to us with a problem, they had a large gas book, and they wanted something to do with that gas,” he said. “So rather than sell it cheaply into the spot market we decided to work together to develop the Tubridgi gas storage facility.”
Mr Cleary said gas would be injected for three to four years.
