Rick Wilkinson
OGJ Correspondent
MELBOURNE, July 16 -- Queensland Gas Co. (QGC), Brisbane, and the BG Group of the UK have signed an agreement with Bechtel Corp. for the company to be project contractor for the proposed Queensland Curtis Island LNG plant near Gladstone in Queensland. The feed gas will be sourced from coal-seam methane (CSM).
The agreement calls for Bechtel to immediately start the front-end engineering and design (FEED) of the plant, which is planned to have an initial single train of 3-4 million tonnes/year capacity and potential to add two more trains for a total capacity of 12 million tonnes/year.
Final investment decision on the project is expected in early 2010 prior to procurement and construction work beginning. First LNG is slated for late 2013.
BG and Bechtel have collaborated on six previous LNG trains—in Egypt and Trinidad and Tobago—and Bechtel also recently built the Darwin plant for the ConocoPhillips Group.
For the Queensland CSM project Bechtel will refine its development of the ConocoPhillips Optimised Cascade process which QGC and BG say is best suited to a plant supplied by CSM. The Cascade process was first used in 1969 when Bechtel built the Kenai plant in Alaska.
If the Queensland schedule holds, the Curtis Island plant may be the first in the world to be based on CSM.
The overall project also includes expansion of QGC's coal seam methane operations in the Surat basin of Queensland, the construction of a 360 km pipeline capable of supplying three trains, the processing plants themselves, and an export facility.
QGC has an 80% stake in the fields, 50% operating interest in the pipeline, and 30% of the LNG side. BG holds the remaining interests in both.
BG also will buy and market all LNG produced by the plant, and it has won the contract to supply Singapore's first LNG receiving terminal.