Woodside provides background to Lambert West subsea tieback
Woodside Energy has issued more details about its Lambert West gas development offshore Western Australia in its house publication Living Energy.
The field came onstream in August. Production heads through a 500-m flexible flowline section to the subsea manifold at the Lambert Deep well, with the commingled gas then continuing through the flowline 15 km to the Angel platform.
From there, the gas is sent via a 50-km subsea pipeline to the offshore North Rankin complex, then delivered to the onshore Karratha Gas Plant for processing.
Lambert West had long been seen as a potential tie-in prospect, but it had been passed over in 2014 as the North West Shelf facilities’ capacity at the time was constrained, with other projects taking preference.
“We were able to reevaluate Lambert West because it was already under an existing environmental plan,” said Woodside principal reservoir engineer Darren Hunter. “While other opportunities might have been larger in terms of volume, we couldn’t have delivered them anywhere near as quickly.”
The semisub Transocean Endurance happened to be available, after having just completed a decommissioning program at the Stybarrow Field, and the development team decided to repurpose a spare subsea tree to avoid long lead times for the equipment.
There were also time pressures, said geological adviser Matt Docherty, to retain use of the existing flowline.
“If we drilled too early, we’d have produced Lambert West without gaining extra production from Lambert Deep; too late, and Lambert Deep would have wound down, leaving value on the table for Lambert West," he said. “We were aiming to find the sweet spot, a clear Goldilocks zone somewhere between 2025 and 2026.”
The North West Shelf co-venturers took FID on Lambert West in January 2024, with startup achieved 19 months later.