By Romel S. Gurky
French energy giant TotalEnergies and its partners have postponed a final investment decision on the planned Papua LNG export project in Papua New Guinea.
This was revealed during a meeting between Patrick Pouyanne, chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies, and James Marape, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, according to a statement by TotalEnergies.
Pouyanne reaffirmed that TotalEnergies, operator of the project, and its international partners ExxonMobil, Santos, JX Nippon, are “fully committed” to Papua LNG.
Pouyanne also said that, after receiving first EPC offers, it appears that the project “will need to keep working with contractors to obtain commercially viable EPC contracts and requires more work to reach FID.”
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“In that view, the project will review the structure of some packages and open the competition to an enlarged panel of Asian contractors. As a consequence, FID of Papua LNG project is now expected in 2025,” the statement said.
Moreover, Pouyanne announced that TotalEnergies intends to drill the first deepwater exploration well on the PPL 576 license in 2025.
TotalEnergies has a 37.55 percent operating stake in the Papua LNG project, ExxonMobil has 37.04 percent, Santos owns a 22.83 percent interest, and JX Nippon holds 2.58 percent.
The project calls for the design of about 4 million tonnes per year of liquefaction capacity adjacent to the existing PNG LNG processing facilities, operated by ExxonMobil and located 20 kilometers northwest of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea,
The facility will receives supplies from the Elk-Antelope gas field.
Editing by Alexander Ginting
