As most would know, it's been just over a year since the NGP...

As most would know, it's been just over a year since the NGP became operational, and 3 months later (3 April 2019) the NT pipelines were brought into the East Coast gas pipeline reporting system (AEMO's Gas Bulletin Board) which allows us to track the gas volumes going through various meters in the network, including the point where CTP's gas enters. This allows us to monitor the performance of Mereenie and PV which is the bulk of CTP's gas production (not Dingo which produces directly to Alice by its own pipeline, but that's only 4-5 TJ/d).

I thought some might be interested to see the data, with some of my interpretation (QC'd with information from the company where possible).

Palm Valley:



CTP conducted a reserves review at PV at the end of 2018, resulting in a big upgrade to 2P from 23 to 42PJ, before restarting the field. Unfortunately when they restarted it significantly underperformed expectations and they were forced to downgrade it again back to 28 PJ, essentially where it started despite PV13 being drilled in the meantime. You can see the restarted production from April to mid-May, then PV comes online and saves the day, taking field production from 6 TJ/d to 13 TJ/d, producing about 7 TJ/d.

The other wells would have continued to decline and would be down to about 4 TJ/d by now, but total production is still around 12.5 TJ/d at full swing, so PV13 is really carrying the team (the Marnus Labuschagne of Palm Valley). This is a great result and I'd say it makes PV13 likely the only economic well CTP has ever drilled. It looks like production from PV13 so far is around 1.5PJ and it's showing no clear signs of being on decline yet (the dip below 12 TJ/d just in the last couple of weeks corresponds to a similar dip at Mereenie so I suspect it's due to CTP turning down the fields in response to lower customer nominations rather than lack of capacity). It will of course come off plateau eventually and CTP is forecasting PV production will drop to 5-7 TJ/d in the next 18 months, though I remain hopeful Marnus will deliver again and outperform that forecast. Without access to the full data set it's not possible to estimate decline rates until the well comes off plateau. When it does happen CTP has mentioned well restarts and compression but IMO that will only briefly delay the inevitable, so the future of PV will ultimately depend on being able to find more PV13s.

Mereenie:

For Mereenie you can see it started the period at full production of about 51 TJ/d after the Mereenie upgrade project, but has been declining since to what appears to be a maximum field production of about 40 TJ/d (assuming this is due to field decline and not lower nominations or increased reinjection). This gels with comments from the company about requiring sustaining capex to keep Mereenie's production up. I think some of these interventions are already visible in the production data.

As Mereenie is in decline we can make a rough estimate of the future field performance:



Keep in mind that actual field performance should do significantly better than this as the aforementioned capex is invested to provide additional production. Mereenie reserves gross are about 170 PJ, and this decline curve only produces a bit over 50 PJ gross, which implies there is a lot of spare capacity in the wells.

All in all, pretty good IMO. But both fields will require investment to keep producing at these rates.