CANBERRA: The Australia Pacific LNG, or APLNG, facility takes coal seam gas from Eastern Australia, liquefies it and then ships the fuel to customers in Asia.
“This is a significant milestone for our company and we are proud to have safely loaded the first cargo from APLNG”, said Ryan Lance, chairman and chief executive officer.
He underlined the long-term nature of the project, which means it has decades in order to prove its worth as a financial investment for Origin.
Origin Energy managing director Grant King was still positive when announcing the first shipment from APLNG though. The exports-focused plant had started production in December.
“These are incredibly large, complex projects and exporting the first cargo is a tremendous achievement for the Origin team that led delivery of the upstream operations, and the ConocoPhillips team that led delivery of the downstream operations”. “This position will only be strengthened as we expect to reach full production from two LNG trains by the end of 2016, reflecting our industry-leading 2P reserves position”, said Maxson.
The APLNG facility is located on Curtis Island in Queensland, Australia.
Construction of the facility began in 2011 and comprises two production units, with the capacity to deliver 4.5 million tonnes per annum of LNG. While Sinopec is the company’s largest customer, Japanese utility – Kansai Electric Power – has also inked contracts for some shipments.
Alasdair Cathcart, general manager of LNG at Bechtel, the United States engineering firm that built all three of the Curtis Island plants, said the simultaneous work “constitutes the greatest concentration of greenfields construction for Bechtel anywhere in the world”.
