Off the back of the Gorgon Project start this week, Chevron also announced its $90b deal to supply gas to the Japanese from its Wheatstone Project near Onslow in Western Australia. The announcement promoted WA Premier to predict that Western Australia will be the world’s second biggest producer of LNG within 11 years.
Chevron has already awarded contracts to WorleyParsons’ subsidiary Intecsea and Technip Oceania for front-end engineering and design (FEED) works for the upstream portion of the Wheatstone LNG Development, and work is well underway. A Final Investment Decision is expected in 2011.
Intecsea will design the subsea gas gathering facilities and pipeline and Technip Oceania will design the production platform.
The upstream scope of the project includes subsea gas gathering for the Wheatstone and Iago fields, an offshore production platform and a 200 kilometre pipeline linking the platform to the downstream gas plant located at Ashburton North, 12 kilometre west of Onslow.
Apache and Kufpec are 25 per cent equity participants in the foundation project facilities.
Chevron has been quietly ramping up their recruitment for this project for some time. With all focus on their Gorgon Project, Chevron has been working on Wheatstone in parallel. The project is set to become one of Australia’s largest resource projects. Discovered in August 2004, Chevron announced their plans in March 2008 to develop the gas resource at a Greenfield onshore LNG and domestic gas project.
Ashburton North, in north Western Australia, has been selected as the LNG hub given its proximity to all the discovered gas resources in the Western Carnarvon Basin.
Since March 2008, Chevon has successfully completed a seven-well appraisal program to further understand the Wheatstone and nearby Chevron-operated Iago fields’ potential, with results indicating they have a large enough natural gas resource base to underpin two LNG processing trains, each with a capacity of 4.3 million tonnes of LNG per annum and a domestic gas plant.
Chevron asserts that Wheatstone will be the most advanced and environmentally responsible LNG project in the world.
Jobs with Chevron: https://www.chevron.au.apply2jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.searchJobs [3]