Two of Australia’s largest LNG projects reached significant milestones this week.
The first hull block of the Inpex Group’s Ichthys LNG project’s central processing facility (CPF) has been laid down at the Samsung Heavy Industry Geoje Shipyard in South Korea.
The CPF, which will be the world’s largest semisubmersible platform when completed in 2015, will gather gas from the Ichthys field in the Browse basin offshore Western Australia. Extracted condensate will be sent to a nearby floating storage and offloading vessel while the processed gas will be piped 890 km to the Darwin LNG processing plant.
The CPF will have topside dimensions of 150 m by 110 m.
Ichthys will produce 8.4 million tonnes/year of LNG from 2016. It will also produce and sell 100,000 b/d of condensate and 1.6 million tpy of LPG at its peak.
Separately, onshore Queensland, the final three prefabricated modules for the Santos Ltd.-operated Gladstone LNG (GLNG) project have arrived on site at Curtis Island.
The Train 1 facility comprises 82 modules and it has taken 2 years to construct and transport these components to the LNG plant. The final three modules are all cryogenic modules weighing a total of 2,777 tonnes.
The GLNG project will produce 7.8 million tpy of LNG with first production scheduled for 2015.