Adelaide Advertiser
Wednesday 9/12/2009 Page: 63
A NEW gas-fired power plant for South Australia is on the cards following an agreement between Beach Petroleum and Canadian utilities company ATCO. Yesterday the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to explore Beach's unconventional gas reserves in the Cooper Basin, northeast of Moomba. Unconventional gas is natural gas trapped in rock formations below traditional reservoirs, and is now the dominant source of gas produced in the United States.
Technological advancements have made recovering the unconventional resource more viable, meaning the Cooper Basin's untapped gas reserves - believed to be as much as 90% of its total resource - can now be extracted. Adelaide-based Beach Petroleum, which will be renamed Beach Energy next week, said it suspected its unconventional gas reserves in the Cooper Basin had the potential for 50 to 100 years of supply.
The company's initial studies suggest the basin holds "tens of trillions" of cubic feet of gas, with the potential to rival some of the world's largest gas fields. Beach managing director Reg Nelson said the memorandum of understanding would look at the practicalities of developing an unconventional gas project from the Cooper, but the cost and details of the joint venture were yet to be determined. "We have some general parameters in terms of looking at distribution and the possibility of power generation," Mr Nelson said. "ATCO has experience in building gas processing plants and pipelines and we intend to use that experience."
He said he hoped Beach and ATCO would move to a binding heads of agreement within two years. "We would like to see something within the next two years, and by that time we should have a good handle on our ability to produce gas and the cost structure of that," he said. "What we would hope to do is build a plant that has the ability to capture any stray carbon dioxide that is in the gas and we could then look at using that for enhanced oil recovery or to grow algae for biodiesel."
ATCO managing director Geoff Walsh said the company hoped the Cooper gas resource could be used for power generation at Osborne, when that plant's gas supply contract expired in five years time. He also said the company was interested in establishing a new power plant, which could be located near existing electricity infrastructure. Mr Walsh said the gas power could be used to augment wind-generated power, which was unreliable.
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