Japanese company Inpex and Britain's BG Group have both announced significant milestones in their efforts to develop major liquefied natural gas projects in the Northern Territory and Queensland respectively.
Japanese company Inpex and Britain's BG Group have both announced significant milestones in their efforts to develop major liquefied natural gas projects in the Northern Territory and Queensland respectively.
Yesterday, BG Group gave final investment approval for the first stage of the Curtis LNG Project in the state's southwest.
It committed $15 billion to the project, which includes building a liquefied natural gas plant at Gladstone, a 450km underground pipeline network and expanding production in gas fields in the Surat Basin around Chinchilla.
The federal government ticked off the project on October 22 and placed 300 environmental conditions on the development to protect groundwater, the Great Barrier Reef and threatened species.
Development of the $20 billion Ichthys liquefied natural gas project off the Kimberley coast has also moved closer, with Inpex calling for tenders to build the main offshore production infrastructure.
The 8.4 million tonnes a year LNG project, which will tap the giant Ichthys gasfield in the Browse Basin and pipe it to Darwin for processing, is 76 per cent owned by the Japanese group with the remainder held by French giant Total.
The project is slated to start production in 2016, at which point it will become the first LNG project developed and operated by a Japanese company.
Inpex today invited tenders to build the semi-submersible central processing facility at Ichthys, 200km off the coast in the Browse Basin, and said four other major infrastructure packages would be put out to tender by the end of the year.
The other packages include those for the floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO), gas export pipeline, production risers and flowlines and the subsea production systems.
Inpex Australia president Seiya Ito said the invititation to tender for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the offshore processing facility represented an important step toward developing the project.
"The issue of the invitations to tender is the culmination of many months of hard work by the project team for what is an exciting, complex and challenging endeavour," Mr Ito said.
"Today, Inpex and Total have confirmed the real potential of Ichthys to significantly build the capacity of the Australian LNG industry to play a role in global energy security."
Mr Ito said the central processing facility would be one of the world's largest semi-submersible platforms in the world. In addition to LNG, it will facilitate the production of up to 1.6 million tonnes of LPG a year and up to 100,000 barrels of condensate a day.
Mr Ito said packages for the onshore plant development at Darwin would be released for tender later, but that Inpex remained on track to sanction development in the fourth quarter of next year.
A significant number of the world's leading engineering and construction companies had prequalified to tender for work on the project, he said, noting that all bidders must commit to providing a "full, fair and reasonable opportunity for Australian suppliers".
That included opportunities for Australian fabrication yards, equipment suppliers and manufacturers to bid for work on the project's various sub-packages.
Ichthys is estimated to contain 12 trillion cubic feet of gas and 500 million barrels of condensate.
