AsianOil: Strike completes pre-FEED at WA ammonia project

Australian natural gas developer Strike Energy has completed a pre-front-end engineering and design (pre-FEED) study on an ammonia and urea manufacturing facility development in Western Australia.
Strike said on September 20 that international oil and gas services provider Technip Energies’ seven-month plant study had resulted in a 6% reduction in capital estimates compared with feasibility study estimates from January.
The project is now estimated to cost $1.64bn – which includes the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of the Haber plant delivered on site in Narngulu – down from the $1.8bn estimate delivered by TechnipFMC.
The 1.4mn tonne per year (tpy) facility – dubbed Project Haber – will use gas supplied from the company’s onshore Greater Erregulla project, which is being developed in two phases. The first stage focuses on the West Erregulla field, with development of the South Erregulla acreage following.
Project Haber will include an 800,000 tpy ammonia train, 300,000 tpy of onsite urea storage, power, utilities and stream generation, railway sidings for transport and a 120-km gas pipeline from the Perth Basin. It will also include a 10-MW green hydrogen electrolyser.
In parallel with the pre-FEED study, Strike said it had progressed additional engineering by Technip Energies to incorporate Haldor Topsoe’s SynCORTM Autothermal Reforming (ATR) technology for ammonia production. The company estimates that the adoption of this technology will reduce the plant’s gas feedstock requirements by around 7% from 86 TJ (2.24mn cubic metres) per day to 80 TJ (2.08 mcm) per day. Moreover, only 552 PJ (14.38bn cubic metres) of feedstock gas is now required to underwrite Haber’s first 20 years of operations.
Strike said this week that it would progress FEED early work scopes, which will include geotechnical and environmental surveys, impact assessments and various other agreements and studies on the water supply, logistics, port, construction camp and raw gas pipeline.
The developer expects to conclude the majority of these activities prior to drilling South Erregulla-1 (SE-1) in the fourth quarter of this year. It noted that success at SE-1 would lead the company to launch the FEED process at Haber, which is anticipated to last less than a year.