Rick Wilkinson
OGJ Correspondent
MELBOURNE, Nov. 5 -- The ExxonMobil Corp.-led Papua New Guniea LNG joint venture has signed a heads of agreement to supply Unipec Asia, a subsidiary of China’s Sinopec, with 2 million tonnes/year of LNG from the proposed project.
With this agreement in place, the project is now conducting exclusive discussions with Sinopec and other major Asian LNG customers for binding sale and purchase agreements that will cover the full project capacity of 6.6 million tpy of LNG.
The project has just completed the front-end engineering and design process and is expected to announce a final investment decision before yearend. Cost is expected to be $15 billion.
Interest holders are ExxonMobil 41.5%, Oil Search Ltd. 34%, Santos Ltd. 17.7%, Nippon Oil 5.4%, MRDC 1.2%, and Eda Oil 0.2%. These participation levels will change when the Papua New Guinea government joins as an equity partner.
