Origin Talinga Power Stations

Description

The Talinga Coal Seam Gas (CSG) Project is a collaborative effort between Origin Energy, the largest integrated energy company operating in Australia and New Zealand, and its participation in the Australia Pacific LNG Pty Limited (APLNG) partnership. Situated approximately 30 kilometres southwest of Chinchilla, Queensland, the Talinga Coal Seam Gas Project serves as a pivotal gathering station strategically positioned to optimize CSG production from the Talinga and Orana gas fields within the Surat Basin.

The Talinga CSG Project encompasses a network of 111 operational CSG wells, with the initiation of commercial production dating back to December 2007. Origin was looking for ways to make this large and ambitious project more energy efficient by taking wellhead gas and using that gas to generate power for the operation of the well. The C30 microturbines that Capstone offered at the time proved to be the perfect tool for Origin to do this and they brought one for almost every CSG well, resulting 100+ C30s being commissioned in Talinga. This was a case that was commissioned by another Capstone distributor that Optimal Group inherited when we became the sole Capstone distributor of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

After a few years of commissioning and after we took over the distributorship, the microturbines started to have huge reliability issues relating to combustion caused by the high liquid content in the fuel. We approached Origin with a solution for this problem, who were on the verge of decommissioning all of the C30s in Talinga. Our solution was to design, build and install knockout fuel pre-conditioning skids that extracted the water content from the gas before sending it into the microturbines. This was a solution Origin was happy to try and we ended up installing the skids adjacent to the microturbines. As a result, the microturbines have been running perfectly ever since.