Papua New Guinea LNG Project to be Brought Online Ahead of Schedule

Researched by Industrial Info Resources Australia (Perth, Australia)--The huge Papua New Guinea (PNG) liquefied natural gas (LNG) project will begin to export LNG ahead of schedule in about three or four months. The LNG production plant will supply 6.9 million metric tonnes of LNG per year to the market. The operator of the project is ExxonMobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) (Irving, Texas), via subsidiary Esso Highlands. Santos Limited (ASX:STO) (Adelaide, Australia) and Oil Search Limited (ASX:OSH) (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea) are joint venture partners.

Rex Tillerson, the chairman, president and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, told U.S. analysts that the start-up period would be moved to early March 2014. "Despite the many challenges, the project is actually progressing a few months ahead of schedule, with the first cargo delivery in the middle of this year.

"It looks like it's probably going to start off early, relative to what we had planned--just a superb job of execution by the project team there in an extraordinarily difficult environment."

In January 2014, Industrial Info reported that the entire PNG LNG project already was more than 90% complete. In February of this year, the commissioning phase had begun on the LNG production plant, the Hides Gas Conditioning plant and the onshore pipeline to connect the two facilities.

Commissioning will continue for a few months yet; however, there are facets of the $19 billion project that are complete and ready for full PNG LNG operations to begin. The jetty at the LNG plant site, the onshore and offshore pipelines, the upstream infrastructure and the Komo Airfield are all complete, and are either in-use or ready to use.

The most recent component of the mega project to reach completion was the 292-kilometer onshore natural gas pipeline. The announcement was made just last Friday that this milestone had been reached. The onshore pipeline traverses through some of the harshest landscape in the world, via lush jungle and connected to a 407-kilometre-long subsea pipeline that eventuates at the PNG LNG production plant.

The entirety of the project will be operational in the second quarter of this year. The first shipment of LNG is expected to leave the docks early in the third quarter.

For more information, see May 10, 2013, article - Papua New Guinea's PNG LNG Project Expected to Begin Production in 2014.

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