site tour scuttle

Guys Guys Guys ... sigh.

Do I understand correctly that none of you managed to get to the site tour?!

To show no fear or favour, and despite being fully invested elsewhere in the ucg sector, I'll give you the scuttle, as I was there:

# Justin Peter (Lawyer) presented ... and did a pretty good job (for a Lawyer).

# He stated right from the outset that couldn't discuss anything to do with the issue of overlapping tenaments in the stouch with QGC ... and he didn't.

# We weren't allowed off the bus but it was driven into the thick of things less than 100m from the GTL plant and with Reactor 3 in clear view.

# Unequivocally, diesel in 14 days (from last Thursday)

# Supposedly 300 employees in the long term to man a 20,000bpd plant ... but I suspect this is rubbery and was over inflated to impress the "keen as mustard" locals.

# Reactor 3 has four wells spaced over 150m at each end of 750 to 1000m long horizontal bores ... Justin didn't (couldn't or wouldn't?) make it clear what this meant from a technical perspective other than it was pretty good in his view.

# Still on Reactor 3, he said that process control let them switch any of the 8 wells (4 at each end) from injection to extraction mode ... I suspect they still have to drill vertical wells to connect into incremental lengths along the horizontal wells to create manageably sized sub-reactors ... I think that must be the case as he said they werent doing extractable point ignition as is the case with Carbon Energy I understand.

# They are big on catalyst research and they are targeting a yield of 2.5 barrels per tonne of gasified coal ... not 1.5 barrels as previously stated.

# He said Reactor 3 was operating and all syngas was being flared through the original Reactor 1 Flare which was only about 50m from the bus ... flaring it was, but it didn't seem to be exactly "raging" imo (but this was the first time I have ever seen a syngas trial, so what would I know!).

# There are 19 current groundwater monitoring bores, some of which go back to the original Reactor 1 burn 10 yrs or so ago. Apparently the test results to date present no contamination concerns. They are stepping out to drill and install some more distant groundwater monitoring wells and I can only presume this is to address known anistopy of Chinchilla coals where directional defect patterns can create far reaching preferential coal seam acquifer connectivity.

# From Angren ucg operation in the former Soviet Union they have access to 50 yrs of groundwater quality monitoring and they are currently reviewing those records ... all looks good apparently.

# The "real" issue of any interaction between competing CBM/ucg operations is that CBM requires the coal seams to be drained and ucg rquires the coal seam to be fully inundated with a reasonable head of groundwater (ie not drained) ... for this reason, simultaneous CBM and ucg operations might need a minimum separation of something like 2km.

# When pressed as to what pub all his staff and subcontractors drank at he muttered something about "many HotCopper posters asking the very same question", so I whistled innocently and stared him down lol.


From Friday's varied presentations, I have to tell you the CBM sector aint smelling so sweet regarding contamination/environmental issues ... so for them to be querying ucg credentials is a "bold" move imo, particularly as I see ucg having superior environmental cred!

The amount of saline drainage water CBM has to extract, manage, treat and discharge is going to be just staggering imo ... flouride, iron and other elevated metals are of variable concern too ... drainage water disposal is a major aspect of ongoing environmental assessment of all the LNG proposals which require many 1000's of wells to be drilled and coal seams drained over huge areas of the Surat Basin. The area is prime agricultural land and landownwers are as a group most concerned and increasingly vocal.

Viva la ucg!!!

Dex