Last week the Prime Minister said the terminal could result in the sale of $15 billion worth of Western Australian natural gas into the Southern Californian market. Now Fitzgibbon has been asking where the gas will actually come from.

He has also asked that given BHPB has relatively few gas interests in Australia, what guarantees has the Government secured that any gas processed through BHPB’s facility will be Australian?

The Shadow minister pointed out that BHPB has three gas interests in Australia with a one-sixth interest in the North West Shelf project and part-ownership of the Scarborough and Scott Reef/Brecknock fields.

BHPB spokesperson Tania Price said the company was considering a range of options for the project but that the proposal presented to the Californian Government was based on gas supplies being sourced from Australia.

“While we are considering our options the focus has been on the Scarborough and Brecknock fields. Although there is a considerable amount of development left to be done, the timing on both fields could be accelerated if the necessary approvals are awarded in California,” said Price.

However the Scarborough field is in deep water and far-from-shore, 270 km northwest of Onslow on the Western Australian coast and is in a very early stage of appraisal.

The Scott Reef/Brecknock fields are also a long way from shore, 350 km north of Broome, and also a long time from development.

Currently BHP is not a joint venture participant of the only two projects that are marketing gas to the US west coast, Gorgon and Sunrise, while Australia’s premier gas field, the North West Shelf project, is focusing on sales to Asia.

If approved, the proposed BHPB Californian terminal will lie 21.5 miles from Oxnard off the Ventura County coast and could be operational in 2008.

Under the name Cabrillo Port, the terminal would be a permanently moored FSRU with LNG being stored in traditional storage tanks, regasified, and transported via undersea pipeline into a local pipeline system.

The FSRU design features three LNG storage tanks capable of storing the equivalent of 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas and will contain eight vaporizers to enable the conversion of up to 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.

Late last year ChevronTexaco also announced plans to build a $US650 million LNG terminal off Baja California, Mexico.

Located eight miles offshore the terminal will have the capacity to handle 1.4 billion cubic feet of gas shipped in liquid form by tanker. Pending Mexican permit approvals construction of the project would begin next year with processing of LNG shipments scheduled to start in the fourth quarter of 2007.