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.
In April last year, the partners delayed the project’s FID to 2025, saying that they needed to keep working with contractors to obtain “commercially viable” EPC contracts.
“The Papua LNG project is making good progress towards an expected FID early in the new year,” Gallagher said during Santos’ first-half earnings call on Monday.
Last year, he said that FID is expected at the end of 2025.
During the earnings call on Monday, Gallagher also answered a question on what the critical paths are for achieving FID, and whether there are other factors beyond achieving acceptable EPC contracts.
He said that the operator “recycled some FEED activities.”
“At the time, which I think was late 2023 … costs were looking a bit higher,” he said.
“So we recycled some of that. And they’ve done a good job of taking considerable costs out,” Gallagher said.
“Again, we’ll update the market when we get to the point of making that decision. But we’re confident that project is heading in the right direction,” he said.
“And it should be in a position at least to be FID-ready around the end of this year,” Gallagher said.
Papua LNG
In March 2023, the Papua LNG partners launched fully-integrated front-end engineering and design (FEED) for the project, while TotalEnergies sold a small stake in the project to Japan’s JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration in June.
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 receive supplies from the Elk-Antelope gas field.
Also, the project includes the use of 2 million tonnes per year of liquefaction capacity in the existing trains of PNG LNG.
TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said earlier this year that “we are not desperate to make the project, but we are working hard to make it back on track, acceptable Capex to deliver some value.”
“We’ll have all the offers by September 2025, so we should be able to take decisions,” he said.
