GDF Suez, Santos Define Final Investment Decision for Bonaparte FLNG Project in Australia

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources Australia (Perth, Australia)--GDF Suez S.A. (EPA:GSZ) (Paris, France) and Santos Limited (OTC:STOSF) (Adelaide, Australia) plan to make a final investment decision (FID) for the Bonaparte floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) production plant during the fourth quarter of 2014.

Project owners GDF Suez and Santos previously had stated that the sanctioning of the project was anticipated to be in 2014. With a four-year construction period required to build the 2 million-metric-tonne-per-year FLNG production facility, it is expected that Bonaparte will be operational by the end of 2018, in the best-case scenario. Ideally, the LNG supply is could begin before the end of 2018, but is more likely to begin at the start of 2019. The project will be the second FLNG production facility after Royal Dutch Shell plc's (NYSE:RDS.A) (The Hague, Netherlands) Prelude FLNG facility.

Prelude is scheduled to begin supplying LNG to the international market by the start of 2017. The revolutionary project is wholly owned by Royal Dutch Shell's Australian operations base, Shell Development Australia's Perth office. Shell waited patiently for environmental approval from the Australian federal government, while environmental regulations were re-evaluated and enhanced in order to allow the project to deploy the first floating natural gas liquefaction plant in Australian waters. The total calculated man hours for the front-end engineering and design (FEED) phase of Prelude topped an outstanding 1.6 million.

GDF Suez, as project operator, awarded a contract to KBR Incorporated (NYSE:KBR) (Houston) subsidiary Granherne, to perform pre-FEED for the upstream aspect of the Bonaparte project. Pre-FEED for the midstream component is being undertaken by Doris Engineering (Paris, France) and began immediately following finalization and announcements of contract awards for both companies, in January 2011. GDF Suez has allowed a period of about three and a half years to acquire necessary environmental permits and for specialist offshore engineers to perform engineering and design for Bonaparte.

Bonaparte LNG will source gas from the Petrel, Tern and Frigate natural gas fields in the Bonaparte basin. These fields contain a combined resource exceeding 2 trillion cubic feet of gas.

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