Karratha gas plant suffers second outage in months

Woodside’s Karratha Gas Plant suffered a partial production outage yesterday in what is the second incident to strike the Burrup Peninsula facility in a matter of months.

Thick black smoke could be seen billowing from the plant’s flare tower and over the Dampier skyline at about 3pm on Saturday afternoon, but appeared to have cleared hours later.

In a statement from Woodside yesterday, a spokeswoman said plant production had been partly suspended following an incident in the early afternoon.

“At 13:10 on 24 June 2017, the Karratha Gas Plant experienced a partial production outage,” she said.

“Work is being undertaken to safely recommence full production.”

“Safety processes were activated.”

It comes two months after the Karratha Gas Plant experienced an unplanned production outage on April 15, which also led to smoke issuing from the flare tower as part of a safety function and all non-essential staff being mustered off site.

LNG production was suspended for more than a week and domestic gas production for three days after the outage.

The Karratha Gas Plant has an annual LNG export capacity of 16.9mtpa and exports to customers in the Asia Pacific region and beyond.

Its plant facilities include five LNG processing trains, two domestic gas trains, six condensate stabilisation units, three LPG fractionation units as well as storage and loading facilities for LNG, LPG and condensate.