The Total Papua New Guinea-led group at the proposed Elk-Antelope natural gas field development known as Papua LNG has outlined an expected timeline for the project.
Philippe Blanchard, Total Papua New Guinea’s managing director, says the joint venture expects to start its front-end engineering design work by yearend or early 2018.
All being well, this will lead to a final investment decision at about yearend 2018 or the beginning of 2019.
The JV is currently completing an appraisal program at the fields and finalizing design aspects.
Elk-Antelope fields are held in retention lease PRL-15 in the Eastern Highlands.
The overall plan is a pipeline to the coast feeding into an LNG facility nearby—or integrated with—the ExxonMobil Corp.-led group’s Papua New Guinea-LNG plant at Caution Bay near Port Moresby.
The upstream central processing facility will be built close to the Purari River west of the Herd Base, which serves the Elk-Antelope field operations.
There will be about 75 km of onshore pipeline corridor descending from the Eastern Highlands processing plant south to the Purari River delta area to west of Kerema and then 265 km of offshore pipeline corridor roughly following the coastline to Caution Bay. There will be two separate lines: one for gas and one for condensate.
