Photo by: Bloomberg
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Australian energy major Santos and its French joint venture (JV) partner GDF Suez announced this week that they would be considering alternative development options for the Bonaparte liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, offshore Australia.
The JV partners said in a shared statement that they firmly believed the field had “material value”, having been fully appraised, but added that the future development of floating LNG technology, although technically robust, did not currently meet the JV’s commercial requirements.
The partners had been expected to make a development decision in 2014, with first production initially slated for 2018.
The project had been flagged to produce around two-million tons of LNG a year, using the natural gas from the Petrel, Tern and Frigate fields.
With the companies now considering alternate development options, the proposed floating LNG project would not be taken into the front-end engineering and design phase at this point.
Santos has a 40% shareholding in the project, with Suez holding the balance.