Woodside Petroleum chief Don Voelte is feeling like the "cat that ate the canary" over the company's progress with its suite of upcoming projects and has laid out his wish list of operations he wants to tick off before his time is up.
Woodside Petroleum chief Don Voelte is feeling like the "cat that ate the canary" over the company's progress with its suite of upcoming projects and has laid out his wish list of operations he wants to tick off before his time is up.
Speaking after the company's annual general meeting today, Mr Voelte rattled off his growth plans for Woodside.
"One of the things I want to do before I get thrown out of my job is to secure the future of Pluto," he said.
"I think we've got Browse secure, I think we've got Sunrise secure, North West Shelf is secured.
"I want to get Pluto not only up and running, not just train one, but I want to secure trains two and three... and hopefully someday, which I'd like to be sooner rather than later, the full expansion of Pluto."
Mr Voelte reiterated his goal to have a total of five trains at Pluto, where the company is planning to bring train one online at the end of this year.
He said that the exploration within the greater Pluto area was proving to be successful, with the company finding gas in four out of six wells drilled so far.
"All of the gas we're finding is phenomenally economic for us," Mr Voelte said.
"I can see a scenario here [at Pluto] very shortly that will almost commit us to four new trains up there.
"We said it's a goal of ours to FID [final investment decision] for train two by the end of the year and it's an aspiration of ours to FID train two and train three by the end of the year."
Mr Voelte's comments come as Woodside yesterday announced that the Sunrise joint venture partners had chosen a floating liquefied natural gas facility to process gas from the Greater Sunrise fields, which lie in the Timor Sea that straddles Australian and Timor-Leste (East Timor) waters.
However that decision has come up to some opposition from the Timor-Leste government, which is still lobbying for an onshore processing facility in the country.
Mr Voelte today said it was not economically viable to build a plant at Timor-Leste and added that the royalties deal the country had negotiated is "phenomenal".
A treaty ratified by the Australian and Timor-Leste governments in 2007 dictates that both countries will receive an equal share of royalties.
This is despite that only 20 per cent of the Greater Sunrise fields lie in Timor-Leste waters while the remaining 80 per cent is in Australian waters.
Woodside will travel to Timor-Leste next week to meet with government officials and explain the project proposal and the benefits of FLNG.
Mr Voelte added that Woodside is committed to creating jobs for both Timor-Leste and Australian citizens, however the breakdown of employees will be determined in the Sunrise front end engineering design study.
Meantime, Mr Voelte said the James Price Point gas processing plant in the Kimberly will almost certainly go ahead.
Ruling out a floating platform for the environmentally sensitive area, Mr Voelte said the gas plant was a "slam dunk" and that he had received an assurance from Premier Colin Barnett yesterday that the onshore plant would definitely go ahead.
"As far as I'm concerned it's a slam dunk," Mr Voelte told journalists after the company's annual general meeting today.
"And the bottom line is we've got our projects all lined up and their moving along ... and every one of our projects is now full blast."
When asked if the James Price Point project was definitely going ahead, Mr Voelte replied, "absolutely".
