Santos Extends Gas Processing Agreements with Beach, Senex
Australian Santos January 10 announced it has executed binding agreement extensions with Beach Energy and Senex Energy for gas processing and related gas liquids purchases at the Moomba gas facilities in South Australia.
The gas processing agreement extensions are expected to result in the production of up to 18 terajoules/day (0.48mn m3/day) of sales gas, or 20 petajoules (0.53bn m3) over the three-year term, Santos said, adding that the gas to be produced under these agreements is equivalent to more than 1% of total east coast domestic gas demand as forecast by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
“These gas processing agreement extensions reaffirm the strategic importance of the Santos-operated Moomba gas plant in facilitating access to the east coast domestic gas market for other producers in the Cooper Basin to increase gas supply and competition, which is the best way to put downward pressure on gas prices for customers,” Santos said.
The agreement extensions will allow raw gas from Beach's western flank of the Cooper Basin and gas from Senex's Vanessa project to be processed to sales gas quality.
The Santos-operated Moomba gas facilities in South Australia's Cooper Basin connects supply from multiple producers in Queensland and South Australia to southern domestic gas markets.
Santos executive vice president midstream infrastructure Naomi James said: "These processing agreements demonstrate the benefits of the Santos strategy to leverage our existing infrastructure to facilitate more gas supply and more competition in the east coast domestic gas market as well as continuing to build our Queensland production for both domestic customers and our LNG exports from Gladstone."
Santos supplied about 70 petajoules (1.8bn m3) of natural gas to the east coast domestic market in 2018, which was almost 13% of the ACCC's expected demand, it said.