Making experience count

Development of Taranaki's Kupe gas and oil field has seen professional life go full circle for energy industry veteran Mike Oakes, as Rob Maetzig explains.

You couldn't get much more of a Taranaki bloke than Mike Oakes.

Kaponga-born and bred, in past years he's played rugby alongside the famous "Legs" Eliason for the Kaponga team and former All Black captain Graham Mourie for Opunake, and worked for the former Taranaki stock and station company Newton King Ltd.

And over the past 32 years Mike Oakes has also worked for a variety of Taranaki-based energy companies on a number of important local energy developments.

Maui, McKee and Waihapa are among the Taranaki gas and oil fields that have benefited from Oakes' involvement as he has progressed up the energy industry ranks.

And now it's all culminating at Kupe, the brand-new South Taranaki gas and oil field where Mr Oakes is production manager and hard at work commissioning the plant towards full production.

Kupe hasn't been a particularly difficult project, but it has had its challenges - not the least the fact that because it has cost about $1 billion, it has been important to keep the development as close as possible to schedule so the field's joint venture owners could begin to receive a return on investment.

That's now happening, and Mr Oakes is an increasingly happy man.

"We started up on December 4, we were able to begin exporting gas a day later, and by December 19 the gas production was stable," he said.

"We think that was pretty good. Not only that, but when we started up the Kupe production station it immediately ran at 39 per cent reliability - and already that reliability has reached 98 per cent. That really is the icing on the cake after four years of hard work."

Mr Oakes' energy industry career began in 1978 when he was manager of the Opunake branch of Newton King, and was approached by the then Shell BP Todd with an offer of a job as administration supervisor at the Maui gas field's newly-built onshore production station at nearby Oaonui.

So he promptly changed career paths, moving out of the traditions of Taranaki's agriculture sector and into the challenges of the region's new- fangled energy industry.

He worked in administration at Oaonui for three years and then decided to move into a more technical role, so in 1981 he became one of the operators on the Maui offshore production station.

Then in the early 1980s, when the government-formed exploration company Petrocorp discovered the McKee oil field inland from Waitara, he joined that company as a shift supervisor at the new McKee production station.

A few years later, Petrocorp was sold to Fletcher Challenge and became Petrocorp Exploration. It discovered yet another onshore oil field - Waihapa in central Taranaki - and the company moved Mike Oakes into its New Plymouth office to help with design and construction of the Waihapa production station east of Stratford.

Experience at both of those onshore oilfields proved invaluable.

Taranaki's crude oil traditionally has a high wax content. For example, the oil from McKee and Waihapa has a wax content of 32 per cent, and it has a pour point - the temperature at which it will go solid - of around 30 degrees Celsius.

To prevent it from doing that, the pipelines that carry the McKee and Waihapa oil from various wellsites to the production stations are heated, and at the stations themselves the oil is treated with chemicals known as pour point depressants which lower the pour points so the oil can remain liquid enough to be transported by truck or pipeline to Port Taranaki for export.

All this means that oil field operators in Taranaki know all about pour points and cloud points (the temperature when oil will begin to go cloudy as a first stage towards turning solid), and how to to deal with them.

It's knowledge that isn't necessary in many other parts of the world where crude oils don't have any wax content, as Mr Oakes discovered when he worked in Canada and Brunei.

He loved the work over there, but by 2005 he and his wife Carol were ready to return to New Zealand to spend more time close to their daughters Sarah and Adelle and their children.

So they moved home - and despite the fact he intended taking a break from the energy industry, he was approached by Australia's Origin to join the company on the Kupe project.

He agreed, and was transferred to Melbourne for a year and then Perth for another year amid technical preparations for the development.

He returned to New Plymouth in 2007 to be a part of the construction project, with responsibility for both the Kupe production station and new storage facilities for the Kupe light crude at the Omata tank farm overlooking Port Taranaki.

And once again he's found himself fully involved in the Taranaki tradition of pour points and PPDs. While the oil that is produced from Kupe certainly isn't as heavy as the crude from the likes of Waihapa and McKee, it still has a wax content that has to be dealt with.

Kupe's light crude oil has a 4 per cent wax content, sufficient to make it go solid at around 10C. And since it would be very difficult to heat the undersea pipeline that carries the oil the 35km from the offshore wellsites to the onshore production station, the PPD is injected into the wells where it mixes with the oil several thousand metres underground and lowers the pour point to below 0C.

It's all working well, and despite the fact the Kupe commissioning has yet to formally finish, the oil is coming ashore and being loaded aboard road tankers that are currently making 37 delivery journeys a day to the Omata tank farm.

While he admits to being a tired man as the Kupe construction project nears its end, he says it has been highly satisfying.

"We're familiar with wax around here, so it hasn't been an issue with the Kupe project. What I have enjoyed is the freedom I've been given to influence design.

"It's been really satisfying, and particularly rewarding to see Kupe come on line trouble-free," he said.

"It all goes to show that if you plan well, you get good execution. If you don't, you don't."

- © Fairfax NZ News