West Australian Petroleum
| West Australian Petroleum Pty Ltd | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Limited |
| founding | 1952 |
| Seat | |
| Branch | mineral oil |
WAPET Pty Ltd (WAPET) was the first company in Australia that the deposit exploration business successful and petroleum in Western Australia promoted. The company was founded as a joint venture between Caltex and Ampol in 1952. It discovered the first commercially viable oil well in Australia in 1953. WAPET was bought in February 2000 by Chevron Australia Pty Ltd , the Australian subsidiary of one of the largest oil companies in the world.
history
When WAPET discovered an oil well on the Rough Range on the North West Cape in Western Australia in November 1953 , it was the first well that delivered an economically usable volume of crude oil. This was not the first oil well discovered in Australia, as it was discovered at Lake Entrance in Victoria in 1924, but it did not yield any usable amount of oil. The Rough Range well produced approximately 400 barrels of oil per day, extracted from a depth of 1099 meters. Another borehole in 1954 showed, however, that the oil deposit was too small to continue to operate the oil well economically.
In 1964, WAPET discovered the first natural gas field in Dongara in Western Australia in the Perth Basin that provided an economically sufficient volume of natural gas. The Dongara natural gas field is owned by the Australian company Arc Energy and had a yield of 12,673,556,000 m³ of LNG (liquefied natural gas ) as of August 2007.
The discovery of natural gas in Dongara led to the construction of the first gas pipeline in Western Australia in 1971, from Dongara to Pinjarra , built by West Australian Natural Gas (WANG), a subsidiary of WAPET. This pipeline is as well known as the Parmelia Pipeline, which is 416 km long and has a pipe diameter of 350 mm.
WAPET was accepted as a partner by the Dutch oil company Shell Australia in 1964 and shortly afterwards WAPET discovered the significant oil deposit on Barrow Island in 1964 . It did so despite the fact that the Australian government had banned the area from drilling and exploiting deposits on fears of radioactive contamination from the 1952 nuclear test , Operation Hurricanes on the nearby Montebello Islands . This ban was lifted in 1953 and WAPET was granted exploitation permission by the government. The Barrow-1 well produced oil in commercially recoverable volumes and was a major oil discovery in Australia. After an investment in oil production of $ 100 million, this oil deposit was exploited from 1967 onwards. Already in 1966 the deposit was raised to a usable volume of 85 million barrels (13,500,000 m³) and after the start of oil production in April 1967 the estimate was raised to 250 million barrels (40,000,000 m³). In 1995 there were 430 wells producing oil and natural gas there, most of them in the southern half of the island. At that time, this region was considered the largest oil production area in Australia.
The discovery of oil on Barrow Island and other deposits led to an intensive geological survey of the Carnarvon Basin by Australian and US oil companies in the late 1960s and 1970s . WAPET discovered another significant natural gas deposit at West Tryal Rocks in 1972 and the Gorgon natural gas deposit in 1980. This region and this deposit became known as the Greater Gorgon and was exploited in the years to come as the Gorgon Gas Project by the Chevron oil company, the acquirer of WAPET. The occurrence of LNG in the gas field of the Greater Gorgon is estimated at (1,100 km³).
Individual evidence
- ^ Australia's Oil & Gas History . In: Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia . December / January 2003/04. Archived from the original on July 26, 2008. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 16, 2008.
- ^ West Australian Petroleum Pty Ltd (WAPET) (1952-2000) . In: Australian Science At Work . Retrieved June 16, 2008.
- ↑ Chevron.com
- ^ A b Murray, Robert: From the Edge of a Timeless Land: A History of the North West Shelf Gas Project . Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991, ISBN 0044422954 .
- ^ History of Petroleum Exploration in Victoria . In: Department of Primary Industries, Victoria . Retrieved June 19, 2008.
- ^ Clements, Kenneth W., Q, Ye., Greig Robert A.: The Great Energy Debate: Energy Costs, Minerals and the future of the Western Australian Economy . University of WA Press, 2002, ISBN 1876268743 .
- ^ Perth Basin Production . In: Arc Energy . Archived from the original on May 26, 2008. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 19, 2008.
- ↑ Pipeline license numbers WA: PL1-3, 5 & 23. http://www.ncc.gov.au/pdf/REGaPaRe-001.pdf
- ^ North West Shelf . In: Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering . Retrieved June 16, 2008.
- ↑ Mitch Reardon. The Good Oil on Conservation in Australian Geographic . Issue 37, January - March 1995. p. 94
