Page 11 - AsianOil Week 35
P. 11
AsianOil OCEANIA AsianOil
In the days before the government finally threw its support behind Papua LNG, Kua revealed that Port Moresby had green lit another, smaller LNG project.
Pasca approved
The minister said on August 30 that he had signed a Ministerial Determination allow- ing Twinza Oil to progress with the Pasca LNG project. The project, which lies in the Gulf of Papua, aims to bring the country’s first offshore gas field on stream. Twinza has said previously the project will produce
condensate, liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and natural gas.
Kua said: “As required by legislation, a development forum will still need to take place but the site is beyond the fishing grounds of the Gulf people, so after the legal checks and social mapping the State Solic- itor’s Office has deemed that there are no landowners. However, the signing of this ministerial determination now allows the benefits sharing process between the Gulf Provincial Government and the National Government to move ahead.”
ConocoPhillips signs new PSC for East Timor gas field
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
US super-major ConocoPhillips has signed a new production-sharing contract (PSC) for East Timor’s Bayu Undan natural gas eld. The signing comes after the government ratified a new maritime border with Australia on August 30, bringing the pro- ject fully under the smaller country’s control.
ConocoPhillips said the new PSC did not change the operation of the eld, which lies 250km south of East Timor in the Timor Sea. Bayu Undan feeds the ConocoPhillips-operated 3.7mn tonne per year (tpy) Darwin LNG plant in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Commenting on the new PSC, ConocoPhillips Australia-West president Chris Wilson said: “We look forward to the Bayu Undan project operating in Timor-Leste’s maritime jurisdiction and contin- uing to develop together with Timor-Leste during Bayu Undan’s nal years.”
The project, which is anticipated to run out of gas by 2022, was previously part of the Joint
Petroleum Development Area (JPDA). e JPDA, which allowed for resource development while the two countries negotiated a permanent boundary, stipulated that East Timor should receive 90% of the tax revenue generated from the project while Australia should receive the remainder.
With supplies dwindling at Bayu Undan, Cono- coPhillips and partners Santos and SK E&S have agreed to carry out preliminary work on develop- ing the Barossa eld.
Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, how- ever, has said the US company may prefer to sell most of its Australian assets on the back of raising $350mn from the sale of its 30% stake in the Sunrise project to East Timor in October 2018.
The analysis house said: “A sale of Darwin LNG, and the capital and emissions intensive Barossa-Cald- ita supply project, would free up capital for buybacks and re-investment in US tight oil – the focus of Cono- coPhillips’s strategy in recent years.”
Week 35 04•September•2019 w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m P11
