Production rates from Pohokura field had declined faster than expected after maintenance work on several wells earlier in the year, OMV said. Photo / File
Output from the country's biggest gas field has fallen about 15 per cent the past six weeks and operator OMV is yet to establish why.
The offshore Pohokura field, the subject of a series of maintenance shuts during the past two years, delivered about 172 terajoules of gas yesterday, according
to Gas Industry Company data. That is down from a recent high of about 205 terajoules in mid-May.
In a notice to customers and the broader industry on Friday, OMV said production rates from the field had declined faster than expected after maintenance work on several wells earlier in the year.
"The causes and possible remedies are currently being investigated," the firm said. This afternoon, the company announced an unplanned outage and said it was preparing to resume production. It expected to lose about 40 TJ of production.
Pohokura, off the Taranaki coast, contributed more than a third of the national supply last year. Reduced gas supplies – due to a series of planned and unplanned shutdowns at Pohokura and other fields in the past 18 months – kept average wholesale electricity prices above $100 a megawatt-hour for most of 2019.
