Dampier and Liqud Natural Gas

Our van seems a lot more ship shape after a morning of sweeping and packing things away and throwing things away.  It was starting to get tricky to move in the jumble that we had.  Joseph and Dominic diligently beavered away at their school work and Nadine and Oskar and Cooper played with the little boy beside us.  I think it was nice for them all to have someone to play with so I left them to it.

It's been very warm here the last few days, with today having a top of 37degrees c, (it got to 38 in the caravan) with a minimum overnight of 22.  That is quite a lot hotter than Brisbane at the moment, and it's hard to imagine everyone at home still in jumpers with blankets on at night.

Later this afternoon we headed off to the Woodside Visitor Information Centre, between Karratha and Dampier.  On either side of the road leading in to the centre are big piles of red rocks, that look like they have been dumped there after being dug out of a mine.  I asked the lady at the information centre, and she assured me they were natural, and noone had put them there like that.  They are the wierdest thing.

This information centre tells about the liquid natural gas (LNG) project offshore from Karratha that began in the 1980s and is still growing to be a huge producer of natural gas in the world market.  One sign said the growth of the project in the next seven years will be bigger than the growth from the last 40 years.  There are currently three offshore rigs with pipes on the ocean floor in to a gas processing plant.  Two of the rigs house about 150 people each, the third is remotely operated and is not normally manned (nnm), which sounded like a good idea to me.

There were displays on the wall showing how the gas is collected, which rocks release the gas and which stop it from coming to the surface.  There were models of the different off shore rigs and the boats they use to ship the gas overseas.  They supply gas to Korea, Japan and China, as far as I could tell from the signs, but there are probably others as well.

The gas processing plant had some very tall towers to one side which often let off huge tongues of flame, like large birthday candles.  The optimization engineer that we met, who was hugely enthusiastic, said they were a safety mechanism designed to burn off any gas that was released to reduce pressure in the plant.  You weren't allowed within 160 meters of the towers.

The big gas tanks they had at that facility were mostly buried in dirt, to help insulate them and keep them at the 160 degrees below zero they needed, but also to stop the tanks from flipping over, which he said was practically impossible.  But at the time this plant was built, there were concerns storing gas from different drills in the one storage tank might cause the different densities of gas to layer and flip the tank.  All very interesting.

The hospital in Karratha is also mostly hidden by dirt banks up against the outside walls.  I assume it is to insulate it from the heat, but it makes the whole place look like a bomb shelter.

Up the road a bit further we drove through the town of Dampier and stopped at the statue of Red Dog, a wandering dog who lived in the area from 1971 to 1979.  He was a bit of a local legend, catching lifts with people to travel down to Perth and out to Karijini (Tom Price, the town is known as).  There is a movie made about him.

At the same spot were some information boards about the area, and how William Dampier was the first European to visit, about a hundred years before Captain James Cook "discovered" the east coast.  he was, according to the board, a bit of a pirate with permission from the British Parliament to do nasty things to any Spanish ships or settlements they cane across.   Apparently the flies really bothered them when they visited the area then, so not much has changed there!  I call them glue flies - you wave your hand ifront of your face to get them out of your nose or off your eyes, and they don't even move.  I'm sure I've accidentally breathed a few up my nose.  last night I cooked mince outside in the electric frypan, and the air was thick with them.  We needed a permanent fly guard to protect our dinner.

Also about Dampier, he wrote diaries (hence the info about the flies) which were used a lot by the guy who wrote Gulliver's travels.  Lillilput may have been based on the west coast of Australia...

Dampier and Karratha are very new towns.  Both have arisen from the iron ore mining boom in the 1960s and the gas mining boom from the 1980s.  Karratha itself was designed purely to house workers in the mining and construction industries that were building the infrastructure for the mining of iron ore, and the whole area was mainly populated by single guys in the 1970s.  

There is a causeway joining the two towns, because Dampier and it's port are actually built on an island, and on either side of the causeway are the salt evaporation lakes.  

The other thing we saw this afternoon was a LONG train, with 230 carriages (2.4km long) loaded with iron ore, driving out the the port at Dampier.  It's a bit of a worry how much dirt we dig up and ship to other countries.

Tomorrow we plan to drive down to Exmouth and camp there.  Grant said we have to be up and away early....we'll see how that goes.  I have really enjoyed the relatively bug free and dirt free caravan park...
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Vicki