Long subsea pipelines need a safe and stable route to shore. Pat Fournier, Senior Geophysicist with Australia’s Neptune Marine Services, explains the need for good quality survey data from beneath the seabed.Australia’s North West Shelf (NWS) is an isolated offshore geographic province extending 2400km along the northwest margin of the continent and is Australia’s largest oil and gas region. Four major sedimentary basins occur along the shelf, namely the Carnarvon, Canning, Browse and Bonaparte, from south to north respectively. The southern margin of the NWS is approximately 1200km north northwest of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia and the administrative centre for most exploration activity and associated oil field services.
Since the discovery of oil in Australia in 1953 at the Rough Range-1 well, onshore Carnarvon Basin, interest in oil and gas exploration has increased. In 1964 oil was discovered on Barrow Island and the NWS continued to grow and eventually became Australia’s premier oil and gas province replacing Victoria’s Gippsland Basins.
In the 1960s and 1970s regional offshore geological and geophysical exploration of the NWS led to the discovery of natural gas and condensate deposits in the Carnarvon, Browse and Bonaparte Basins, commencing with the Rankin discovery in the early 1970s. With gas replacing fuel oil in Australian homes and factories, increasing global energy demands, and LNG exports becoming a more viable source of income for the Australia economy, oil and gas companies and their export partners are looking to further exploit the large natural gas reserves in the Australasian region and specifically along the NWS.
Australia currently has two LNG processing plants; the North West Shelf Venture (NWSV) in Karratha and the Darwin LNG Plant, that deliver gas to local and international markets. These two facilities are located approximately 1800km apart along one of the most natural gas rich and remote coastlines in the world. The remoteness of the NWS is becoming less of a deterrent to investors as infrastructure develops in the region (with the aid of increased government support), and the large size of new natural gas discoveries offsets the high financial commitment required by the oil and gas companies to develop their fields.
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