The elephant in the room, page-17

You have some good points, my friend, but a faster development than proposed by CNE is entirely feasible, regardless of all the factors you quite correctly mentioned. However, I worked on the Woodside operated Laminaria Corralina FPSO project in the Timor sea for a couple of years in both design and construction. This was initially a 200 M bbl field discovered in 1994, which went into production in 1999. Just add 20 years to the Laminaria timelines and you have SNE today, I reckon. I will try to upload some info on Laminaria here, more can be found on Google. Cheers, J

Laminaria / Corallina is located in the Timor Sea, 550km north-west of Darwin. Water depths increase from 50m to 300-400m near Laminaria and 400-500m over Corallina, before deepening to over 2,000m further north in the Timor Trough. Although it is located outside the Joint Petroleum Development Area it is twice as close to East Timor as it is to Australia and debate continues as to whether the tax profits should be shared between the two governments.

Laminaria was discovered in October 1994 by the Laminaria-1 exploration well. This was followed by appraisal drilling and the acquisition of an extensive 3D seismic survey over Laminaria and most of AC/PO. Corallina, located about 10km north-west of the centre of Laminaria, was discovered by the Corallina-1 exploration well during December 1995. The Laminaria field extends into the neighbouring Laminaria East licence, WA18L Petroleum, held by BHP Petroleum and administered by WA.

The initial development plan consisted of three subsea production wells on Laminaria and two production wells on Corallina. Surplus gas is re-injected through a dedicated gas-injection well (East Corallina-1). The fields have eight wells developed on reserves of about 200 million barrels.

The wells, connected to the Northern Endeavour the floating production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO), consist of vertical, deviated and horizontal well bores, with single-chrome completions. These have been designed to allow flow rates producing in excess of 50,000bbl of oil per day.

Production from the A$1.37bn Laminaria / Corallina fields began in late 1999. It is thought that the field is now around 89% depleted (as of February 2008).