Malampaya up for maintenance shutdown; stable power supply assured

The Malampaya natural gas field — which provides fuel of up to 45 percent of Luzon’s electricity needs — will go on a scheduled maintenance shutdown for two days in July and another two days in September, the Department of Energy announced.

Authorities reassured the public, however, that the power grid of the country’s largest island would not be affected by the brief supply disruption since the work on the offshore facilities was timed to coincide with maintenance schedules of the power plants that use Malampaya’s fuel.

“There are questions as to whether supply would be affected, and the answer of the Department of Energy is that there’s nothing to worry about,” Energy Undersecretary Wimpy Fuentebella said in a briefing. “This shutdown has been synchronized with those of the [power] plants involved.”

Malampaya provides fuel for three gas-fired plants in Batangas, which generate a total of 2,700 megawatts.

The first shutdown is scheduled for the weekend of July 15-16, 2017, affecting the gas supply to the Santa Rita power plant which has two units generating 250 MW each.

Engineering work at the offshore platform will be conducted to prepare for the scheduled “pigging” in August 2017 of the 504-kilometer subsea pipeline that connects the offshore platform to the onshore gas plant in Batangas.

Pigging involves insertion of a cleaning apparatus (called a “pig”) at one end of the pipeline, and is recovered at the other end after cleaning the length of the connection.

The energy department said another scheduled shutdown for Malampaya would be made on Sept. 23-24, also a weekend.

This will be a combination of preventive and corrective maintenance work, which will involve the testing of shutdown valves, emergency de-pressurization systems tests and the repair of a heat exchanger.

The affected plants will be the Santa Rita, Ilijan and San Lorenzo facilities.
In the scheduled shutdowns — both to be made during weekends — Fuentebella said demand for electricity would be substantially lower than during weekdays, thus the DOE’s confidence that no power outages for the Luzon grid would ensue.

In the meantime, maintenance work of Shell Philippines Exploration B.V. on their facilities, which will run for 21 days in August, and another pipeline for the Tabangao onshore gas plant that will run for one week in September will not affect gas supply to the plants that generate electricity for the Luzon grid, Fuentebella added.