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The winning late last year of two multi-million-dollar contracts for the transportation of light oil and LPG from the offshore Taranaki Kupe field is the latest of many feathers in the cap for New Plymouth’s Hooker Pacific company. By Neil Ritchie
“We are really pleased that as a Taranaki headquartered company we won these Taranaki contracts, it’s another chapter of Taranaki companies doing Taranaki proud, winning work locally, as well as further afield.” Kupe is expected to play a significant part of the energy sector; producing about 20 petajoules of gas (for partner Genesis Energy), about 100,000 tonnes of LPG and up to two million barrels of condensate (light oil) per annum for perhaps the next 15 years or so. And the Kupe contracts Hooker Pacific have won are also significant. Hooker’s fuel haulage division has been operating around the clock since early December, when Kupe gas, condensate and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) started being extracted from the raw gas stream and processed at the onshore production station near Manaia in south Taranaki. Up to 10 tanker-and-trailer units are on the road around the clock, seven days a week taking condensate from the onshore Kupe production station, near Manaia, to the Omata tank farm on the outskirts of New Plymouth for later exporting from Port Taranaki. There can be anywhere up 40 tankerloads from the Kupe production station each day, with the more than 30 new drivers taken on for the contracts clocking up about 1000 kilometres per vehicle per day. The new drivers are based out of New Plymouth and Hawera; “So these new contracts benefit both the south and north Taranaki communities,” says Ramsay. The 10 truck-and-trailer condensate tanker units are painted in high luminescent lime green – “it’s called Hookers hi-viz,” he jokes. They are highly visible so that people are more aware of them as they work for Kupe operator Australian giant Origin Energy on behalf of all the Kupe partners: Origin, Genesis Energy, New Zealand Oil & Gas and Japan’s Mitsui. The LPG is transported in equally striking units for Rockgas, a subsidiary of Contact Energy that in turn is majority owned by Origin. The LPG tankers take their loads by road to LPG depots scattered around the North Island. “And although we’ve only recently started, Kupe has the potential to become our biggest contract for the transportation of crude or condensate,” says Ramsay, who has been involved in all such contracts Hooker Pacific has won since the early 1980s. “Our first contract was to transport crude oil from McKee in north Taranaki for the government’s Petrocorp, which then owned the field, and it’s something we still do today for current owner Todd Energy.” Another major contract involved trucking oil from the Waihapa field in central Taranaki to New Plymouth for several years until Petrocorp built a products pipeline to Omata for that crude. Since then Hooker Pacific has trucked a wide variety of crudes and condensates from different fields scattered around the region, often in the initial years of production before pipelines are built. Other significant energy related contracts include trucking crude oil for Cheal field owner Tag Oil, as well as the distribution of fuel around the North and South Islands for Shell New Zealand and for Chevron NZ, which markets the Caltex and Challenge retail brands.
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.2 March-April 2010 |
Jim Ramsay, chairman and managing director of Hooker Pacific’s parent company, Transport Investments Ltd (TIL), is thrilled with the Kupe contracts.