While it has been widely acknowledged that the three projects did not share so much as a common road - based on decisions made by the proponents early on - the operators have been improving on that front as they have gradually moved into operations phase.
Duke told delegates at the Society of Petroleum Engineers' Asia Pacific Oil & Gas Conference in Perth yesterday that "people observing from the outside may not be aware of the level of collaboration that has already been taking place".
"Certainly I know that in Queensland there has been a great collaboration between the four operators [Shell, Santos, ConocoPhillips and Origin Energy] in the LNG projects that has been fundamental to maintaining the social license to operate that we've been able to enjoy," Duke said.
"That didn't happen by accident. It happened by the fact that the senior executives of [all the] businesses were sitting down on a very regular basis - monthly - and working out what needs to be done to make sure that we protect the interests of the industry in a way that's socially responsible and benefits all citizens of the state."
He cited the "Safer Together" initiative which has five working groups: safety leadership, competence and behaviour, land transport, process safety and rig site safety.
Duke said "Safer Together" now has more than 100 members.
Energy News has also learned that standardised safety inductions were also designed for contractors across all three projects.
"There are a bunch of other things that happened, particularly around safety, which has no boundaries or patents in our industry," Duke said.
"We do a lot of good stuff that's called ‘collaboration' that has no label. What we don't do is do a good job of explaining what we're doing."
BHP Billiton Petroleum's vice president engineering David Purvis that the oil and gas patch differed from mining, in which his company is also heavily involved, in that very rarely does one company have a patent.
"No one has a patent on FPSOs or fraccing, though we have our own tweaks, and I believe that's a positive," he said.
"In the mining side it's different. Miners hold very dearly to their patents and there's very little collaboration between the major miners.
"That's actually something I'm very proud of - the sharing that takes place between project partners and the service sector."
Also regarding collaboration, Schlumberger's Perth-based Australasia managing director Aparna Raman said the oil patch could do much better with commercial alignment and contractor models, which were still "fairly traditional".
"One of the fundamental things in collaboration has to be the way the commercial model can align itself, as that drives the end outcome," she said.
"We go through our boom and bust cycles - and it's ‘feast or famine' - and as a result there's always a winner and a loser; and I think as an industry we've got to understand that we can't have these big wins and big losses because that is unsustainable.
"The fundamental challenge with that is the lack of ability to invest in capability and technology for the long-term as we don't have predictability in the future."
