Rick Wilkinson
OGJ Correspondent
MELBOURNE, Sept. 10 -- Chevron Australia has signed agreements with three buyers for a total of 3 million tonnes/year of LNG supplied from its share of the Gorgon-Jansz project off Western Australia.
Chevron will supply 1.375 million tpy to Osaka Gas and 1.1 million tpy to Tokyo Gas, both of Japan, as well as 500,000 tpy to South Korea’s GS Caltex Corp., in which Chevron holds a 50% interest. The South Korean deal will include LNG from other Chevron-held system gas as well as from Gorgon.
The Japanese contracts are for 25 years and the South Korean contract for 20 years. They will begin in 2014.
An add-on to the Japanese deal is that Osaka Gas will purchase a 1.25% interest in the Gorgon project and Tokyo Gas a 1% interest from Chevron’s 50% share. This part of the deal is subject to Australian Foreign Investment Board approval and will reduce Chevron’s share to 47.75%. ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC each hold 25% of the project.
The LNG sales come hard on the heels of ExxonMobil’s contract sales from the project to Petronet of India and PetroChina for its share of the LNG production.
The contracts are another step forward towards the project’s final investment decision, now expected within weeks rather than months.
The proposed Gorgon-Jansz project includes two subsea pipelines from the Gorgon, Jansz-Io fields to Barrow Island feeding into a three-train, 15 million tpy LNG plant and a domestic gas plant. The latter will be connected by an undersea spur to the main onshore Dampier to Bunbury gas trunkline.
