Pilot says "strong" business case for West Aussie CCS project
Sydney-listed Pilot Energy on June 7 said that the results from the technical studies and projects economics “demonstrate the strong fundamentals which support the business case” for the development of a near term carbon capture and storage project in the Mid West in Western Australia.
Stage 1 of the Mid West Clean Energy Project involves the conversion of the Cliff Head oil field from oil production to a CCS project. “Recent technical studies and economic analysis has confirmed the commercial viability of providing CCS services to the Mid West,” the company said. “The technical studies also indicate sufficient scale in the offshore permits held by Pilot to provide CCS services in parallel with permanently storing CO2 produced during Stage 2 and Stage 3 of the Mid West Clean Energy Project.”
Technical studies completed by CO2Tech have confirmed the significant CO2 storage potential of both the Cliff Head production license (WA 31-L) and the WA-481-P exploration license areas with a total of 10.8mn metric tons 2C contingent resources and best estimate prospective resources of 80.4mn mt.
The conversion of the current Cliff Head oil field production operation into a CCS operation will occur over three basic stages – storage reservoir preparation, facilities conversion and CO2 injection operations. Additionally, the initial CO2 injection operations can also be expanded to both increase the injection rate up to 1mn mt/year and overall storage capacity to 16mn mt, Pilot said.