| Petroleum
News: The Mackenzie gas line numbers game: Week
of January 01, 2006
More studies grapple with initial marketable
gas resources available for a pipeline from
Canada’s Arctic; anchor fields rated at 5.8 tcf
Gary Park
Petroleum
News Canadian Contributing Writer
One of the imponderables of the Mackenzie
Gas Project will come under growing scrutiny as
the venture enters the regulatory hearing
process in late January.
For now, getting a fix on the reserves
that are available from the Mackenzie Delta,
Beaufort Sea, Colville Hills in the Central
Mackenzie Valley and even the Yukon’s Eagle
Plains to back the C$6.9 billion undertaking —
based on 2003 dollars and Imperial Oil’s latest
calculations — is as varied as the responses.
The latest round of filings with the
National Energy Board does little to achieve
consensus.
Various petroleum engineering consultants
turned in varying assessments of the ultimate
initial marketable gas resources — but they were
all responding to different instructions.
Anchor fields number constant
The one number that seems to remain fairly
constant is the 5.8 trillion cubic feet assigned
to the three anchor onshore Delta discoveries —
Imperial’s Taglu 3 tcf, Parsons Lake 1.8 tcf
shared by ConocoPhillips Canada 75 percent and
ExxonMobil Canada 25 percent and Shell Canada’s
Niglintak 1 tcf.
Even then the consulting firm of Gilbert
Laustsen Jung Associates has disagreed slightly
by estimating the recoverable marketable gas at
5.69 tcf from original gas in place of 8.273
tcf.
A GLJ study estimates ultimate resources
of 21 tcf of initial marketable gas in the
Mackenzie-Beaufort region and 3 tcf at Colville
Hills.
The breakdown of discovered resources puts
the Mackenzie-Beaufort at 10.3 tcf, Colville
Hills at 400 billion cubic feet and Eagle Plains
at 100 billion cubic feet. It excluded 600
billion cubic feet of discovered initial
marketable gas in the deepwater Beaufort.
The production forecasts were based on a
period ending in 2054.
GLJ hired by anchor gas owners
GLJ was hired by the anchor gas owners to
establish that there is sufficient gas to
support initial shipments of 820 million cubic
feet per day by the producers, with another 400
million cubic feet per day coming from other
producers to cover a one-third equity stake by
the Aboriginal Pipeline Group.
Sproule Associates, in a study
commissioned by the Mackenzie Explorer Group —
made up of companies expected to be the source
of gas for the aboriginal group — calculated the
marketable resources that might ultimately be
available for a Mackenzie pipeline at 67.9 tcf,
of which it said 11.5 tcf has been discovered.
Sproule projects that the
Mackenzie-Beaufort has 56.7 tcf of ultimate
initial marketable gas onshore and offshore, of
which 10.9 tcf is discovered and 4.2 tcf at
Colville Hills, of which 500 billion cubic feet
is discovered.
That study estimates there could be a
further 7 tcf in the Yukon and Mackenzie Valley,
of which only 100 bcf has been discovered in
Eagle Plains.
Sproule: 1.7 bcf per day for 20 years
Dealing only with resources that represent
primary supplies for the Mackenzie pipeline,
Sproule said onshore resources alone should be
able to support a pipeline capable of carrying
1.7 bcf per day for more than 20 years.
The Sproule base case also said that by
removing constraints on pipeline size to handle
undiscovered resources, initial sales gas
volumes of 1.1 bcf per day should be able to
grow over 10 years to 2.5 bcf per day and hold
that level for 10 years without having to
develop higher-risk, deeper-water Beaufort
plays.
A study by Cizek Environmental Services
for the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee,
based on the Sproule and GLJ work, forecasts the
three anchor fields could be able to deliver 1.2
bcf per day for 14 years and 1.8 bcf per day for
9 years, suggesting that the pipeline would need
connections to other existing and undiscovered
fields to keep it operating at capacity for 50
years.
Cizek said that a pipeline capacity of 1.8
bcf per day and total sales gas of 22.81 tcf
would require 44 discovered fields. |
