Contractor Baker Hughes will relaunch an offshore drilling services business in Western Australia within weeks to work on a big pipeline of oil and gas activity.
The local drilling arm was shut in 2018, but burgeoning demand has sparked investment at the GE-owned company’s Jandakot warehouses to bring the division back to life.
“The oil and gas market is definitely healthy,” Baker Hughes Australian oilfield services director Mark Annand said on a Monday media tour.
“It’s more buoyant than it has been in a while.”
Woodside’s huge Scarborough project is under way and the giant Browse field looms large on the horizon. Chevron is considering the third stage of its Gorgon project.
WA is not the only hub of action, with Baker Hughes opening a new facility for drilling on the east coast in the past two years.
Mr Annand said the business saw demand taking off in what is traditionally a cyclical industry.
That’s a long way from the mood in the middle of the previous decade, when oil prices averaged less than $US80 per barrel for some years.
The Jandakot plant already tests and sets up the huge yellow “Christmas trees”, which sit on subsea wells off the north west coast.
There’s reason for optimism about carbon capture and storage, too, with Mr Annand touting breakthroughs for “a couple of projects”.
![Baker Hughes Australian oilfield services director Mark Annand in Jandakot.](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/e9c5255775714e3e4f001bbca699911c0b3ef90e.jpg)
Credit: Baker Hughes
The country’s best known carbon storage project was at Chevron’s Gorgon plant on Barrow Island. That struggled to store emissions when it switched on in 2019 but has since sequestered 9 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.
International Energy Agency modelling shows the technology — which extracts CO2 from LNG process and pumps the gas into a reservoir underground — will be critical for the world to achieve net zero by 2050.
“The demand and interest in CCS has definitely increased,” he said.
“Its not in its infancy, but its definitely in its early years.”
Baker Hughes enterprise growth director Jeremy Campbell-Wray said the number of CCS projects globally was going up dramatically, with a lead time of almost a decade for many developments.
Mr Campbell-Wray said interest was growing in offshore storage options in Australia — a move beyond the country’s onshore focus so far.