The Lena arrived at the New Plymouth port yesterday, carrying the reeled flowlines aboard for linking the OMV-operated Maari oil development’s subsea wellheads with the floating production storage and offtake vessel Raroa.

Due to arrive at the port early next month, the UK Sealion-operated dive support-installation vessel Toisa Proteus will install these flowlines and help install the Maari wellhead platform.

Meanwhile, specialist subsea trenching equipment for the Kupe gas-condensate project and six of the eight “bullets” for onshore storage of liquefied petroleum gas arrived at Port Taranaki late last week.

The 7002-tonne ship Pangani docked after making a special voyage to Cairns to load the trenching equipment that another vessel, the Faaborg, had been unable to deliver to Taranaki because of engine problems.

The Pangani had earlier loaded the six liquefied petroleum gas storage vessels – each of which is 40m long, 4.5m in diameter and weighs 160t – at Port Kelang, Malaysia. Two others are due to be shipped to Taranaki in April.

Once unloaded from Pangani, the trenching equipment will be checked and taken out by the Rockwater 2 dive-support vessel to off south Taranaki.

The Rockwater 2 is scheduled to use specialist equipment and high-pressure water jets to create seabed trenches for the Origin Energy-operated Kupe gas-condensate project.

The specialist reel barge Apache is then scheduled to lay the pipeline and umbilical in the trenches.

The LPG bullets are due to be taken on heavy-lift vehicles by road to the production station site, south of Hawera, where they will be installed close to the main piperacks and control room.

Meanwhile, all three of the Kupe production wells are now at more than 2000m as they head towards their scheduled vertical depths of about 3400m. The batch drilling of the Kupe South-6, 7 and 8 wells is expected to be completed about May or June.

Over the 19 year-plus economic life of Kupe, the field is expected to produce about 254 petajoules of gas, 1.1 million tonnes of LPG and 14.7 million barrels of condensate.