this is good news guys. when they are talking about pressure, and early gas flow rates, this bodes well for eventual production numbers. The initial water flow rates for Harrier are lower which is necessarily a good thing as they are trying to not damage the coals ability to maintain high flow rates.
The early flow with only 1/3 of the water head stripped off means that we have fully/almost saturated coals. The image above of a Langmuir isotherm can be used to determine at what point you can expect gas flows based off testing from a coal sample.
Basically, you use the red dot to indicate what your starting pressure is against how much gas is in your coal, then you go across to the blue line and use that to indicate what pressure you will start producing at - we are producing early which is good and indicative of high saturation in the coals - an important factor in getting your wells into production. There are still many months to run on the pilot testing before they will hit peak flows.
Unfortunately we need a lot more data from the reservoir to be able to predict what kind of flow rates we will end up with. The good thing is:
- we are producing early - we are producing above modelled expectations - we have low water produciton rates
overall, the result is much smaller than that of those from the Walloon in QLDs Surat, but still economic, and without a pinch of the water issues they have up there which is adding MORE and MORE cost to the CSG wells.
1. It avoids the potable reservoir depressurisation risk which is something they have had to bring in to rightly protect the farmers water supplies in QLD. The risk is mostly controlled via well construction.
2. It significantly avoids having to have substantial surface water handling and processing capacity which adds substantial cost to the operation early in the life of the well. Avoiding this means that lower flow rates will still produce an economic well.
Cheers,
SF
MEL Price at posting:
31.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
