Rick Wilkinson
OGJ Correspondent

MELBOURNE, Dec. 11 -- Sunshine Gas Ltd., Brisbane, plans to build a $572 million (Aus.) LNG plant at Gladstone on Queensland's east-central coast. It is the third company to do so after separate, but similar plans announced earlier this year by Arrow Energy and Santos.

Sunshine signed a heads of agreement with Japan's Sojitz Corp. to jointly develop the 500,000 tonne/year plant using gas from Sunshine's coal seam methane project at Lacerta in Queensland's Surat-Bowen basin.

Supply from Sunshine's other prospects could also be added to the mix.

The proposed plant is smaller than those proposed by Arrow and Santos (1 million tonnes/year and 3-4 million tonnes/year respectively).

Sojitz will be operator with 70%, and Sunshine will hold 30%. Sojitz also is considering taking as much as a 20% interest in the Lacerta project.

Lacerta, in ATP795P, has 3P reserves of 1,097 petajoules, which includes 469 petajoules of 2P category and 44 petajoules in proved reserves.

Front-end engineering and design is timed to begin during first-quarter 2008, and the aim is to achieve first production in early 2012.