BG Group has reached a key milestone in its project to produce LNG from coal seam gas in Queensland.
The company, one of four groups planning similar projects with LNG plants on Curtis Island near Gladstone on the state’s central-east coast, has announced that first gas production from the company’s fields in the Surat basin has been transported to the island near the liquefaction terminal site.
Arrival of the gas completes a 2-year construction period to lay in excess of 46,000 sections of 1-m pipe some 540 km from the Queensland interior to the coast. This is the longest large-diameter buried pipeline in the country and links the company’s CSG fields in one huge gathering system feeding into the coastal plant.
Final construction phase has now begun and commissioning work on the first of two planned LNG trains on Curtis Island is expected to start early in 2014.
BG says the $20.4 billion (Aus.) project is scheduled to be brought on stream during second-half 2014. Known as Queensland Curtis LNG, the plant will be the first in the world to produce LNG from CSG.
Of the other three CSG-LNG projects, two are also nearing completion. Gladstone LNG is a combine of Santos, Petronas, Total, and Kogas, while Australia Pacific LNG is a consortium of Origin Energy, ConocoPhillips, and Sinopec. The fourth, Arrow LNG, a partnership of Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina, is lagging behind and is by no means certain of remaining a stand-alone project. It may integrate with one of the other three.
