US energy giant Chevron said it has completed maintenance work at its 8.9 mtpa Wheatstone LNG plant near Onslow in Western Australia.
“Scheduled maintenance at the Wheatstone natural gas facility has been safely completed,” a Chevron spokesperson told LNG Prime in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
The spokesperson did not provide any additional information.
Chevron’s CEO Mike Wirth recently said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call that Wheatstone had a turnaround underway of “one of the two trains and also the offshore platform and some common facilities”.
He said that the company was in the process of resuming production with the second train coming back online in early May.
Prior to this, Chevron’s unit in Australia completed the first major turnaround in October last year at the Wheatstone LNG plant but most of these works focused on the first LNG train.
The Wheatstone LNG facility, which shipped its first cargo in 2017, features two trains and a domestic gas plant located at the Ashburton North Strategic Industrial Area in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.
Chevron said last year it had managed to increase the design capacity at the Wheatstone plant by 9 percent.
Natural gas arrives from the offshore Wheatstone, Iago, Julimar and Brunello gas fields.
The company’s Australian unit has a 64.14 percent operating stake in Wheatstone. Other partners include KUFPEC (13.4 percent), Woodside (13 percent), and Kyushu Electric (1.46 percent), together with PE Wheatstone, partly owned by JERA (8 percent).
Also, Chevron holds an 80.2 percent interest in the offshore licenses containing the Wheatstone and Iago fields.
