Australia's Woodside starts Enfield oil production

Australia's Woodside Petroleum today said it had started production at its Enfield oil project offshore Western Australia.

Woodside said it was ramping output up towards capacity rates at the 100,000 barrel per day (bpd) field, boosting the company's total production and adding competition to the region's small heavy and medium sweet crude market.

The company originally slated first Enfield production for the fourth-quarter of 2006, before accelerating the timetable to the third and then the second quarter, which then slipped back into July after the field's floating production storage and offtake vessel, Nganhurra, needed repairs.

Woodside operates the Enfield project with a 60 per cent share, with the remainder held by Japan's Mitsui & Co.

Enfield crude, from the second-largest development in the Asia-Pacific market this year after Russia's Sakhalin-1, is a heavy sweet crude, similar to Indonesian Duri grade in terms of gravity but with a better products yield, traders have said.

Its API gravity stands at around 21.7 and its sulphur content at 0.12 per cent, making it much heavier than Australian flagship light-sweet Cossack crude.

Woodside cut its 2006 production outlook by 5 per cent in June, mainly blaming start-up delays at new projects such as Enfield, as well as bad weather earlier in the year.

The company has also experienced problems at the Chinguetti oil field, offshore Mauritania in West Africa, and construction delays at the Otway project in southern Australia.

In Western Australia six cyclones earlier this year affected production on the North West Shelf, while US Gulf of Mexico development delays have been caused by high demand for oil and gas services after hurricanes Rita and Katrina in late 2005.

- REUTERS