“In less than five years from now our plans are to have in place and operating four times the Woodside equity capacity at Pluto as compared to our capacity at North West Shelf,”? Mr Voelte said after announcing Woodside’s first-half results.
Mr Voelte played down any rivalry between Chevron and Woodside saying “There is plenty of room for everybody. We’ve built our plans around the fact that Gorgon is going to be there.”? However he was confident the difficulties facing Chevron with installing greenfields infrastructure at Wheatstone and Gorgon would put Pluto at an advantage.
“The way I see it we’ll build Trains 2 and 3 before Gorgon, in fact our construction guys told me yesterday that we’ll be 12 to 18 months in front of Gorgon on people requirements and needs.
“I don’t even worry about Wheatstone, that’s kind of after Pluto gets done and bottom line is it’s a long extended feed,”? he said.
To date, Pluto Train 1 on the greenfield foundation is 72.5 per cent complete with more than 150 of 264 modules delivered. Train 1 has officially commenced commissioning and the first LNG is expected in early 2011, with production capacity expected by mid-2011.
Mr Voelte declared that the company would spend up to $150 million on front-end engineering and design (FEED) for Trains 2 and 3, with first gas scheduled for 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Trains 1, 2 and 3 are all located on the lower plateau and Woodside has confirmed that the upper plateau will support a fourth train and possibly a fifth.
Trains 4 and 5 co-location and infrastructure studies are underway and it is anticipated that a second jetty and possibly two tanks will need to be constructed in conjunction with the additional trains.
Meanwhile, Woodside is in discussions with five unnamed companies about gas supply. Mr Voelte has said discussions are “well advanced”? for two, “ongoing”? for one and “under consideration”? for two.