Flooding in Queensland, Australia has forced at least two coalbed methane (CBM) outfits working in the Surat basin to close down operations.
"To a large extent the roads are impassable - you can't move logistics in or out of the area to sustain businesses," said David Breeze, general manager of the Surat Basin Corporation, to Reuters.
"The oil and gas industry operates in difficult areas, off the main highways where there are only gravel tracks so most of the oil companies had stopped operations at this time," he added.
The companies experiencing a suspension in activity, Easternwell Group and Savanna Energy, are active in Queensland's Surat basin – an area located in the southwest region of the state.
Two rigs operated by Savanna, a company based out of Calgary, have been marooned by floods. Savanna said one of the units, worth about $6 million, is believed to have been severely damaged.
“Extreme rainfall had curtailed our operations throughout much of December [and] the rigs are currently inaccessible,” said Savanna in a Jan. 5 press release.
Prior to the disaster, Savanna was drilling the CBM wells for Australia Pacific Liquefied Natural Gas, a joint venture between Australia’s Origin Energy and US supermajor ConocoPhillips. The $25 billion project will connect the wells by pipeline to a new LNG plant at the port city of Gladstone.
Origin Energy’s spokesman Tim Scott told Reuters the company shut in about a dozen production wells of the 300 it operates in the Surat and Bowen basins.
"All of our CBM exploration activities are on hold at the moment," said Scott, adding that he did not foresee any delay to the construction of the company's export project and there had been no material impact so far.
Other Australian CBM operators, including Santos and BG Group, said that so far the floods have had a minimal impact on operations
Recommended Reading
APA, Palantir Expand Partnership to Deploy New AI Across E&P Operations
2024-09-25 - APA Corp. will introduce new AI capabilities to its oil and gas operations with Palantir Technologies’ Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) software.
ZEMA Global to Acquire Morningstar’s Commodity Data Business
2024-09-23 - ZEMA Global Data Corp. is acquiring Morningstar Commodity Data to meet demand for data and analytics prompted by the global energy transition.
SLB Launches New GenAI Platform Lumi
2024-09-17 - Lumi’s machine learning capabilities will be used to enhance SLB’s Delfi digital platform offering for better automation and operational efficiencies.
PakEnergy Plows Ahead with New SCADA Solution
2024-09-17 - After acquiring Plow Technologies, home of the OnPing SCADA platform, PakEnergy looks to enhance its remote monitoring solutions.
ChampionX Releases New Plunger Lift Well Solution
2024-09-13 - The SMARTEN Unify control system is the first plunger lift controller in ChampionX’s SMARTEN portfolio.