My thoughts:
Issue - is ENI a potential competitor for pipeline capacity? Does ENI have the gas in its Blacktip production facility to compete with CTP for sales into the NGP for eastern Australian customers?
My conclusion is - not likely.
Why? For practical purposes, I think that its gas is all but fully committed.
Reasoning:
See Oil and Gas Journal (OGJ) article below. Sales to NT Gov of 30 PJ pa over 25 years amount to 750 PJ. 1BCF = 1.055 Petajoules (Santos). Therefore ENI has committed 710.9 BCF to the NTG. How much do that have left? According to the 2004 Woodside-ENI EIS the total sales gas in the field is 933 BCF of raw gas. There is also 5.7 million barrels of condensate (which when added to the 933 Bcf probably accounts for the figure of 1.2 TCF quoted by OGJ below). So on these figures ENI has 183 BCF unaccounted for. That is 193 PJ. That is less than 20% leeway before the supplier would be eating into gas that is already committed to ENI's principal customer.
A cross-check can be made by using the reserves figure for the field that ENI's publicity has consistently given as 150 million barrels of oil equivalent. 1PJ = 171,937 boe (Santos). Therefore 144.3 MMBOE (150 less the 5.7 MMB condensate) converts to = 839.3 PJ. That figure only gives ENI 89.2 uncommitted PJs. That is a leeway of 10.6%. I do not think ENI would take the chance.
Oil and Gas Journal 09/15/2009, By Rick Wilkinson, OGJ Correspondent
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2009/09/eni-starts-blacktip.html
Eni starts Blacktip gas field off Australia
MELBOURNE, Sept. 15 -- Eni Australia’s wholly owned Blacktip natural gas field in the Bonaparte Gulf has been brought on stream via two wells on a wellhead platform, with production moving to a gas processing plant at Wadeye on the Northern Territory coast and a 275-km pipeline to the Alice Springs-Darwin trunkline farther east.
The field lies in 50 m of water about 100 km from the coast. It was discovered by a 50:50 joint venture of Woodside Petroleum and Eni in 2001. Eni bought Woodside’s share in 2005.
Reserves are estimated at 1.2 tcf of wet gas. Condensate will be recovered at Wadeye and piped 4 km back off the coast to a single point mooring system for direct loading onto tankers.
The $270 million (Aus.) development will deliver 30 PJ/year of gas to the Northern Territory’s Power & Water Corp. over the next 25 years.
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