The beautiful New Ireland Province has the potential to host PNG’s second liquefied natural gas project after the discovery of a giant offshore gas condensate field in the New Ireland Basin.
Named the ‘Exotica North Gas Prospect’, privately owned Australian oil and gas exploration company, Peak Oil (PNG), made the discovery in 2017, and confirmed the presence of LNG this year, where they made the announcement at the 17th PNG Resources and Energy Investment Conference in Sydney on Tuesday, December 12th.
“We’ve got two petroleum prospecting licences between Lihir Island and New Ireland – the mainland,” said the Board Chair of PEAK, Professor Brent McInnes, who went to New Ireland in 1988 for his research studies.
“We’ve made some discoveries of natural gas seepage on the bottom of the ocean, just south of Lihir Island. And the size of this seepage is as significant as the Hides gas field in the mainland of Papua New Guinea.
“We believe the gas volumes are significant enough to justify a standalone LNG production plant on New Ireland and that’s a multi-billion-dollar investment with multiple cargoes potentially leaving the New Ireland Province for the Asian market every year.
“We’ve met with the local Members of Parliament and with the provincial governor, Sir Julius Chan, and they are very supportive of this activity going forward. They believe it’s a new direction for the diversification of the economy of New Ireland. Currently, it’s heavily dependent on the gold mine – Lihir Island – and this would extend the life of the communities, businesses and would lead to thousands of jobs.”
Prof McInnes, who is a professor in Economic Geology and Geochemistry at Curtin University in Australia, further said there should not be any environmental concern at this stage as they have documented that lifeforms have evolved to cohabitate with the petroleum that is leaking onto the ocean floor.
“Modern day exploration and production systems are quite safe and we look forward to working with environmentalists to help us develop this project in the most sustainable way possible,” he stated.
“Our modelling shows that the gas formation process probably started about 14 million years ago but it really ramped up as the basin got deeper sediments about 5-10 million years ago.
“What we know is that the natural gas seepage has been occurring on the bottom of the basin for at least 30 years but scientifically, we’ve looked at age-dating some of the seepage materials and we know from that data that the seeps have been operating for at least 10,000 years.
“I’ve been working in the islands for 35 years,” he continued. “I did my PhD in the Tabar Island Group. When I was working there for my PhD, I would find bitumen samples onshore in various rock types and from that point on, I had an idea that there must be petroleum generated in the basin.
“Using basic scientific techniques, getting some assistance from – not only – the Department of Petroleum and Energy but other companies, we were able to generate enough data to realise that there was a petroleum system operating in the New Ireland Basin. Most recently, a German research vessel “SONNE”, came down and surveyed the sites and found that the gas is seeping into the basin and how big the structure is; the structure is 32km long and 9km wide.
“This is the same size as the Hides gas field.”