AUSTRADE Australian Trade Commission : A$2 billion invested in North West Shelf

21 Jan 2016

A multi-national joint venture has been given the go-ahead for a US$2 billion investment in a subsea development at the North West Shelf Project, located about 125 kilometres north-west of Karratha off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia.

The project, called the Greater Western Flank Phase 2, will develop 1.6 trillion cubic feet of raw gas using subsea infrastructure and a 35 kilometre, 36 inch pipeline that connects to an existing platform.

Australia's largest oil and gas company, Woodside Petroleum, the operator of the North West Shelf Project, is joined in this development by partners BHP Billiton, Shell, BP, Chevron, and Japan Australia LNG - a joint venture between Mitsui & Company and the Mitsubishi Corporation.

Woodside Petroleum CEO Peter Colman said that this is the fourth major gas development for the massive North West Shelf project in the past seven years. It follows the A$5 billion North Rankin B platform, the A$2.5 billion Greater Western Flank Phase-1 development, and the A$1.2 billion Persephone gas field development.

Gas will initially be extracted from five wells in the Lady Nora, Pemberton, Sculptor and Rankin fields, starting in the second half of 2019. The three remaining wells, in the Keast and Dockrell fields, will begin production in the first half of 2020.

Offshore, the North Rankin Complex, the Goodwyn A platform (GWA) and the Angel platform dehydrate the raw hydrocarbons for export via a dual subsea pipeline system to the Karratha Gas Plant (KGP), which is located onshore on the Burrup Peninsula near the town of Karratha.

The Karratha Gas Plant, with five LNG trains and a domestic gas plant processing raw dehydrated gas, exports LNG, condensate and LPG via ship, as well as conditioned gas via the domestic gas pipeline.