Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) and Woodside Petroleum Ltd. are making good on their vision for shared infrastructure to stimulate stranded natural gas field development in Australia by rolling out plans for joint pipeline and gas processing initiatives in the northwestern part of the country.

Chevron Australia Managing Director Nigel Hearne told the WA Petroleum Day in Perth on Sept. 14 that the supermajor was targeting production from its wholly owned Clio Acme fields and intended to make use of existing infrastructure to achieve this.

About 3.5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas has been identified in the Clio-Acme fields, which are part of Chevron’s greater Wheatstone area, and Hearne said the fields could supply about 50 LNG cargoes a year and 70 terajoules a day of gas to the West Australian domestic market.

Hearne’s comments come at a time when the North West Shelf LNG plant’s five trains on the Burrup Peninsula need new sources of feedstock, with Australian Woodside having identified Browse field gas as an anchor tenant for its flagship operation, which counts Chevron as a joint venture partner along with Shell and ExxonMobil.

Perth-headquartered Woodside is also expediting a planned new pipeline to source gas from its remote Scarborough development, which is east of Clio-Acme, to a potential second train development at the Pluto LNG plant, located 180 km northwest of Karratha. A final go ahead has been flagged for 2020.

Hearne did not reveal whether the North West Shelf or Pluto was the preferred port of call for Clio-Acme gas, but said close cooperation was the key to bringing stranded West Australian LNG online faster and more efficiently. He said that maintaining gas plants at optimum production would require anchor tenants working in tandem with smaller, more flexible developments.

The massive cost blowouts in recent years of the Chevron-operated Gorgon and Wheatstone projects, as well as the Inpex-led Ichthys LNG plant development in Darwin, has dampened investor enthusiasm for megaproject gas developments in Australia.

This has brought the big players to the table to talk collaboration. At the Association of Petroleum Production and Exploration Conference in May this year, Woodside and Chevron both flagged cooperation as critical to unlocking abundant, but stranded Carnarvon basin gas on the North West Shelf.

On a shared platform with Coleman, Hearne said the challenge of keeping 11 trains on the North West Shelf of Australia at full-capacity for the next 30 years, and maximizing competitiveness, could be achieved with a “shared vision for the (Carnarvon) basin.”

Hearne unveiled the idea of an interconnected Carnarvon Basin multi-user offshore pipeline to commercialize Scarborough gas via the North West Shelf, Pluto and Wheatstone gas plants.

Woodside subsequently announced its $US11 billion development plans for Scarborough and said it had been in talks about joint development initiatives in the Carnarvon basin with a major player.

Coleman said at the time: “If they’re willing to come and pay me some money to make a pipeline larger and so forth, we’re very open to that.”

The Woodside boss said the clock was ticking, however, and any deal would have to be done by the end of September before front-end engineering commenced on Scarborough.

Offshore