O’Brien revealed this during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on November 6.
Discussing the three LNG projects the company is participating in, QatarEnergy’s NFE and NFS and Sempra Infrastructure’s Port Arthur LNG Phase 1, he said that ConocoPhillips is reducing its total project capital estimate from $4 billion to $3.4 billion.
According to O’Brien, this reduction is due to a $600 million credit from the Port Arthur Phase 2 project.
“The credit is for shared infrastructure costs previously incurred by Phase 1 equity holders. As a reminder, we only have equity in Phase 1, not Phase 2,” he said.
“With this credit, we’re approximately 80 percent complete with our total project capital for these three LNG projects. Approximately $800 million of project capital remains, averaging just north of $250 million of spend annually, with a declining trend from 2026 to 2028,” O’Brien said.
He noted that all projects “remain on track” and the partners continue to expect first LNG from NFE in 2026, Port Arthur in 2027, and NFS after that.
LNG strategy
“We’re also making considerable progress in advancing our commercial LNG strategy, which will further strengthen our long-term free cash flow generation capacity,” he said.
“As a reminder, our strategy is to connect low-cost North American natural gas to higher-value international markets,” O’Brien said.
He said that ConocoPhilips is leveraging its decades of LNG experience on a global scale to “advance our strategy, which nicely complements our more than 2 bcfd, or 15 mtpa equivalent, of Henry Hub-linked US natural gas production.”
“We have fully placed the first 5 mtpa from Port Arthur Phase 1 with combined regas and sales agreements into Europe and Asia,” he said.
“In terms of offtake, we’ve recently agreed to take 4 mtpa from Port Arthur Phase 2 and 1 mtpa from Rio Grande LNG, bringing our total offtake portfolio to about 10 mtpa, the lower end of our stated 10 to 15 mtpa ambition,” O’Brien said.
In August, O’Brien revealed that ConocoPhillips had booked regasification capacity at France’s Dunkirk LNG facility and also signed an Asian LNG sales and purchase agreement.
Besides Dunkirk LNG, ConocoPhillips previously made capacity bookings at import terminals in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
Plans unchanged
Asked about the plans for the comany’s LNG strategy, O’Brien said that “our strategy remains unchanged. We’re executing exactly what we said.”
“The 10 to 15 mtpa is a size that we feel very comfortable about. It gives us the size that we want to be able to optimize our portfolio, be able to divert cargoes, as I mentioned in the prior question, be able to control really the value chain,” he said.
“I don’t think anything’s really changed there. The 10 to 15 is kind of what we’re looking to fill out right now,” O’Brien said.
