Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, said it will use floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology for the first time to develop the Prelude and Concerto gas fields off Western Australia.
A draft environmental impact statement on the plan will be released for public comment on Oct. 12, Claire Wilkinson, Perth-based spokeswoman said by telephone yesterday. Shell is working on production approvals for the project, it said in a statement.
Chilling gas to liquid form on floating facilities has yet to be deployed commercially and may suit fields that are too small and too far from the coast to be profitably developed through onshore plants. Prelude and Concerto, 100 percent owned by The Hague-based company, are in the Browse Basin off Australia’s undeveloped Kimberley coast, where more than one-third of the nation’s known offshore gas is located.
Shell is planning for the first application of its floating LNG technology to be in Australia, Jon Chadwick, executive vice president for Asia, said in the statement.
“This project will produce LNG, condensate and liquefied petroleum gas during its 20-plus years of operation,” he said.
Design and engineering studies are under way, Shell said. Wilkinson declined to comment on the timing of a final investment decision or the first gas for the project.
Shell awarded a contract in July to Samsung Heavy Industries Co and Technip SA to design, construct and install floating LNG facilities.
The company said its pioneering use of floating LNG technology will involve a vessel “much larger than an aircraft carrier.”
Malcolm Brinded, Shell’s executive director of international upstream, made the comments during a conference call yesterday. The technique is a “game-changer,” allowing discoveries that are small and too far from the coast to justify onshore plants to be profitable, he said.
The ship carrying the plant “will be the largest vessel in the world,” Brinded said.
The vessel will weigh about 600,000 tonnes and be around 480m long, 75m wide, and designed to withstand a “one-in-10,000-year” tropical cyclone, he said.
Australian Energy Minister Martin Ferguson welcomed Shell’s announcement, calling it a sign Australia is cementing its status as a leader in the global LNG market and a “highly attractive and secure destination for investment,” Ferguson said in a statement.
Floating LNG is important to Australia because of the remote fields within its waters that remain uneconomic in the absence of this technology, Ferguson said. A report by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization last year estimated “stranded” gas reserves to be around 140 trillion cubic feet and worth around A$1 trillion (US$903 billion), he said.
Australia is now the fifth-largest exporter of LNG, generating A$10.1 billion in sales for this year and last year, Ferguson said. With the addition of Woodside Petroleum Ltd’s Pluto LNG project and the Chevron Corp-led Gorgon venture, this is expected to more than double to about A$24 billion by 2017 to 2018, he said.
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