Kupe onshore

Construction of the onshore production station in south Taranaki for the billion-dollar offshore Kupe gas project is the most visible sign of the huge effort a myriad of companies and hundreds of people are putting in to ensure gas starts flowing from the field by mid-2009.

While it may be a case of “out of sight, out of mind” for most people hoping to glimpse the jack-up rig Ensco 107 working 30 kilometres off the south Taranaki coast, there are no such illusions for people going past the production station site off Inaha Rd just out of Hawera.

It is a huge site, covering more than 17.5 hectares, and cannot be ignored. Site works started in October 2006 and the production station project is now over 60 percent complete. The production station is rather like a village, with its own roads, buildings, including eating houses, workshops, tanks, stormwater ponds, trees and hedges.

About 120 people onsite have so far worked over 1 million hours without a single lost time incident, with about 90 percent of the present workforce coming from around Taranaki. However, that number expected to swell to about 450 in the last quarter of this year as construction activity peaks. In addition, about 30 percent of the equipment so far installed has been manufactured, or supplied, by Taranaki companies.

The production station will take and process the Kupe raw gas stream and separate that into sales gas, which will be fed in to the high pressure North Island pipeline network (partner Genesis Energy has rights to all Kupe gas), condensate (the light oil often associated with gas) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

Among the many international and domestic companies contracted to the Technip-Origin Energy alliance, which is managing the project on behalf of the partners, is multi-national engineering group Beca.

Beca's involvement so far has been doing design work for civil and structural works that include site earthworks and drainage, roads, equipment foundations, buildings, pipe racks and other structures – as part of an overall $50 million contract for the production station.

The group’s New Zealand director for oil and gas, Henry Harbuz, says Beca’s design work is now essentially complete. The actual civil and structural construction work – carried out by other contractors such as major trans-Tasman civil contracting company Fulton Hogan – is over 60 percent complete.

“The Beca project team for this project peaked at around 25 full time staff some months back. We also seconded a few people from other New Zealand offices to help,” says Harbuz.

He adds that Beca is confident of securing future work in the rapidly growing New Zealand oil and gas sector.

“This sector is providing a good workload for Beca, not only in our New Plymouth office but also in Wellington, Tauranga and Auckland,” he says. “And I believe it is also providing good workloads for New Zealand firms in general.”

The Kupe partners – operator Origin (50 percent), Genesis (31 percent), New Zealand Oil & Gas (15 percent), and Mitsui E&P NZ (four percent) – expect to complete the Kupe development by about mid-2009.

They expect the field to produce about 254 petajoules of natural gas (and supply up to 13 percent of New Zealand’s gas needs), for perhaps 15 years or longer, as well as 14.7 million barrels of condensate and 1.1 million tonnes of LPG (and providing about half of the country’s annual LPG needs.

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