Woodside weathers storms with $720m sales | Business | The Australian

A SERIES of cyclones off northwest Australia may have offset the inaugural contribution of Chinguetti to Woodside's first-quarter production, but they failed to dampen the energy group's balance sheet as turnover for the period jumped 25 per cent on soaring oil prices.
Sales for the March quarter jumped by more than $140 million to $720 million as the price of crude oil rocketed. Output gained 1.3 per cent to the equivalent of 14.3 million barrels of oil, and included oil from the $US750 million ($1 billion) Chinguetti development as well as Gulf of Mexico production resulting from Woodside's acquisition of Gryphon.

And the company revealed further successes for its appraisal program with Pluto-3 on the North West Shelf encountering a gross hydrocarbon column of 102 metres and, since the end of the quarter, Thylacine South finding a gross gas intersection of 223 metres in the Otway Basin.

Production was affected by a spate of heavy storms - this season five out of six cyclones have crossed the West Australian coast, requiring offshore oil production to be suspended - and the natural decline of the Laminaria-Corallina fields in the Timor Sea and the Legendre and Mutineer/Exeter reservoirs off the northwest coast.

Woodside said sales volume of 13.7 mmboe was 4.2 per cent lower than in the corresponding period and 7.2 per cent down on the previous quarter because of timing issues.

The lower sales volumes resulted in a 5.1 per cent lower revenue return compared with the fourth quarter of 2005.

Woodside said that with the successful start-up of Mauritanian production at Chinguetti, it now had production from four countries across three continents.

First reported news of Pluto-3 confirms Woodside's hopes that the field north of Barrow Island, discovered only last April, contains more gas than the 3.6 trillion cubic feet initially estimated. Woodside said the appraisal well had flowed a maximum rate of 31.7 million cubic feet a day.

"Results confirmed expectations and successfully delineated the eastern flank of the field," the company said without disclosing a revised reserves estimate.

Finding more gas is critical to Woodside's plans to bring Pluto on stream as a greenfields LNG project by 2010. Another appraisal well, Pluto-4 is planned for this quarter.

Woodside said the significance of the Thylacine South result was being evaluated.

The Geographe and Thylacine gas fields are in the Otway Basin south of Port Campbell in water depths of 80-100m and are being developed as a gas supplier to Victoria with a planned investment of $1.1 billion.

The first phase is the $810 million development of the Thylacine field which is expected to come into production mid-year.

Woodside's share of domestic gas production from the NW Shelf gas project was 261 terajoules a day - down slightly on the previous quarter because of lower customer demand. LNG production from its one-sixth share of the Karratha export plant was down to 5204 tonnes a day, 370 tonnes a day lower than fourth-quarter 2004 because of warmer conditions and cyclone-induced production restrictions.

Shares in Woodside fell 29c yesterday to $48.80.