Australian Energy Producers journal.

QGC Upstream has achieved its best-ever wells performance, with a record well availability of over 97% across 3000+ online wells. Unplanned deferment rates have decreased by more than 70% compared to 2023, and pumping wells have reached a record mean time to failure of 1790 days. Operations and maintenance costs have been reduced by over 35% per well, enabling QGC to deliver additional wells unde…

Student enrolments in Earth sciences and resources engineering have substantially decreased, and fewer degree programs are now available at universities across Australia. A 2025 survey by the Australian Geoscience Council highlighted a lack of awareness amongst high school students of Earth science, geoscience and geoengineering as areas of study. Interest in the subject was found to be the most …

Shell QGC continually seek to lift production while lowering unit operating cost (UOC). At QGC, unplanned downtime in hydraulic power units (HPUs) is a major driver: across a large wellsite fleet, more than 10,000 unplanned HPU trips occur annually. Each trip triggers a corrective maintenance (CM) work order (WO), yet diagnosis often becomes a hit and miss exercise due to limited historical failu…

Australia’s emerging basins are gaining strategic significance within the energy landscape, with the potential to deliver additional domestic gas supply and underpin future liquefied natural gas (LNG) export opportunities. This paper examines trends and opportunities across three emerging onshore gas basins with active play opening operations: the Perth Basin in Western Australia, Queensland’s Ta…

Supervisors in high-risk industries operate at the critical interface between organisational intent, regulatory expectations, and frontline work execution. Their role includes building and sustaining a positive safety culture, balancing competing priorities such as production, reliability, safety and cost, managing and mentoring people, and ensuring compliance with regulatory and organisational r…

Brownfield engineering is emerging as a strategic driver of industrial performance as organisations increasingly seek value from existing assets rather than new builds. Operating within the constraints of live facilities, legacy design decisions, and incomplete information, brownfield engineers deliver targeted upgrades, life extension initiatives, and safety critical modifications that directly …

When fields decline and approach end of life, gas producers must manage both changing production conditions and evolving market dynamics, challenging traditional approaches to optimisation. ExxonMobil Australia has delivered value enhancement through an integrated molecule management approach across its Longford and Long Island Point (LIP) facilities, while continuing to invest in gas development…

The on-bottom stability of subsea infrastructure is influenced by its interaction with the seabed, which can change over time due to operational and environmental factors. The application of photogrammetry techniques to non-dedicated subsea remotely operated vehicles (ROV) video footage offers a novel approach to assessing subsea infrastructure and its interaction with the seabed. This study outl…

Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) vessels are major offshore oil and gas production facilities, and they generate significant greenhouse gas emissions throughout their lifecycle. Although emissions from the Engineering, Procurement, Commissioning, Installation (EPCI) phase may not represent the largest contribution in terms of total lifecycle footprint; they are considerable and frequ…

In the liquefied natural gas (LNG) operations space, process simulations are widely applied during design phases and during operation for designing and troubleshooting process flows. However, the use of continuously running simulations for live operational monitoring remains limited. The adoption of live process simulations (commonly referred to as digital twins) offers significant potential to e…

Cross-border carbon capture and storage (CCS) is essential for decarbonising the world’s and Asia-Pacific’s (APAC) industrial emissions. Globally, Europe and APAC indicate a high potential for cross-border transport with a forecast of 127 mtpa cross-border opportunity by 2035. Yet beyond geological advantages, successful cross-border CCS also requires coordinated policy frameworks and regulatory …

Despite Australia’s historical reputation for cost overruns and project delays, the nation’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector continues attracting significant mergers and acquisitions activity, driven by fundamental competitive advantages including relative political stability, established infrastructure, substantial untapped reserves, and strategic proximity to Asian demand centres. This analy…

The energy transition is well underway with many countries and companies assessing options for CO2 sequestration. The CO2 value chain captures, transports, stores or utilises carbon dioxide from industrial sources. The value chain can include international shipping of CO2 as part of large volume transport and storage solutions. Traditional shipping of CO2 involves an intermediate storage solution…

This paper covers a case study demonstrating how automating greenhouse gas (GHG) calculations can improve accuracy, transparency, and efficiency across natural gas operations. This US case study from the Appalachian Basin shows how operational activity data and measurement inputs can be mapped directly into emissions estimation models, producing comprehensive inventories for carbon dioxide (CO2),…

Subsurface storage of CO2 introduces a series of new technical challenges that require the development of new mathematical models. One such challenge is that the balance of viscous, capillary and gravitational forces results in velocity-dependent mixing and thus relative permeabilities. The substantial variation between near-wellbore and far-field velocities necessitates including these velocity-…

Despite International Energy Agency ‘requirements’ to reduce energy use in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, global energy demand is still increasing. Renewable energy has made swift inroads into power generation, with wind and solar power (variable renewable energy sources, VRES) now making up a significant proportion of power generation in many developed countries. However, the Nirvana …

In high-hazard industries, most safety failures arise not from poor systems or inadequate documentation, but from everyday behaviours. Leadership signals, peer norms, and workplace culture determine whether rules are followed, risks are raised, and safe choices are reinforced. While systems set expectations, it is behaviours that ultimately drive outcomes. Proaction International, a dss+ company,…

Throughout Australia, agreement-making processes and associated community-benefit outcomes have become a cornerstone of the resources industry’s social licence to operate (SLO). While First Nations engagement has historically been the onshore sector’s domain, proponents of domestic offshore projects are increasingly collaborating with relevant First Nations groups and representative bodies to sha…

Geopolitical uncertainty continued in 2025 with the continuation of the war in Ukraine, Israeli actions in the Gaza strip, and the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA for the second time. The Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia 2025 Production and Development Year in Review looks back at the oil and gas development and production activities in Australia in 2025 and tries to pr…

Since the commencement of production in 2014, Shell’s Queensland Gas Company (QGC) Surat Basin coal seam gas asset has been constrained by high well intervention demands, materially impacting production availability and operating cost as the well population matured. Intervention demand has been driven primarily by solids-related artificial lift system failures, well cleanouts, and increasing inte…