Gillard rules out support for East Timor stance on Sunrise
AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Julia Gillard has ruled out backing East Timor’s bid to have the Sunrise liquefied natural gas project plant located on its shores in return for agreeing to host a regional centre to process asylum seekers.
The Australian quoted her as saying commercial decisions should be made in the best interest of shareholders though she confirmed a re-elected Labor government would pursue a dialogue with East Timor about the processing centre.
East Timor has been fighting to get the Sunrise joint venture to locate its plant in the country.
However, the Woodside Petroleum-led JV has rejected this plan, saying a floating LNG facility would make greater commercial sense.
The Sunrise partners have chosen to use Shell’s FLNG technology, which the supermajor will use for its Prelude project, to develop the Greater Sunrise fields.
This will involve the use of a floater capable of producing 4 million tonnes of LNG per annum along with condensates through a phased development with seven initial production wells.
The Greater Sunrise fields lie about 450km northwest of Darwin and are estimated to contain about 5.13 trillion cubic feet of gas and 225.9 million barrels of condensate.
A final investment decision on Sunrise is expected in 2012 with first LNG targeted for 2016.
The Sunrise JV participants are operator Woodside (33.4%), ConocoPhillips (30%), Shell (26.6%) and Osaka Gas (10%).
Friday, 20 August 2010
PetroleumNews.net
http://www.petroleumnews.net/StoryView.asp?StoryID=1139168
