Project operator Inpex confirmed to Energy News this morning that the upcoming milestones for Ichthys are:
- Completing key elements of the subsea installation;
- Continuing central processing facility and floating production storage and offloading facility pre-commissioning and commissioning; and
- Completing construction and testing of onshore plant packages.
Ichthys, which project partner Total says is essentially three mega-projects rolled into one, is slated to start in the third quarter of next year after Inpex announced in September 2015 that the project start-up would be delayed by about nine months.
Joining the two pipeline sections — 882km offshore and 8km onshore — means the pipeline is now ready to deliver gas from the Ichthys field in the Browse Basin, offshore Western Australia, to the project's onshore facilities at Bladin Point near Darwin for processing.
The 42-inch diameter pipeline is the longest subsea pipeline in the southern hemisphere and the third longest subsea pipeline in the world.
Inpex announced in November that the project safely completed the offshore pipelay for its 890km gas export pipeline after around two years.
"We are very pleased with the overall safety performance during the pipeline manufacturing, construction and installation processes spanning more than four years," Ichthys project managing director Louis Bon said.
"Building the pipeline involved multiple movements of 73,000 individual concrete coated pipe joints, with each pipe joint weighing approximately 26 tonnes."
To protect workers from injuries associated with lifting, Inpex used innovative automated lifting equipment at the pipe fabrication and coating yards, and offshore installation vessels utilised state-of-the-art pipe joint handling systems.
"Today's milestone means we are one step closer to physically connecting our onshore plant near Darwin to our offshore facilities which will be permanently moored in the Ichthys field for the 40-year life of the Project," Bon said.
The project will have annual LNG production capacity of 8.9 million tonnes.
The project partners of operator Inpex are Total (30%), Tokyo Gas, Osaka Gas, Chubu Electric Power, Toho Gas, Kansai and CPC.
Back home
Back in Japan, Inpex reported it had established the presence of oil and gas in an area offshore the Shimane and Yamaguchi prefectures, according to the Japanese news agency for Natural Resources and Energy.
The agency said the drilling campaign unearthed samples of rock and a large and a large amount of data considered valuable in determining oil and gas in the area.
Inpex also confirmed a thin layer of gas at the shallow section of the seabed along with an indication of gas at the section immediately deeper than the shallow section.
ANRE said it would keep conducting offshore drilling surveys in the sea areas around Japan, and would analyse and assess the collected data from the latest success and have a report ready by the end of 2016-17.
