“We said in November the project would stall if legal and fiscal certainty had not been achieved by the year’s end. That certainty has not bee reached and so the project has stalled,” a company spokesman said.

“This means we will not be spending any more money on it.”

When asked what this reprioritising meant to other projects in the Woodside portfolio, the spokesman pointed to the November briefing which outlined the new interest in the decades old discoveries of Scott Reef and Brecknock in WA’s Browse Basin.

Woodside put the project on ice after the Timor Leste government declined to put forward to parliament a 2003 agreement was designed to conclude the years of often tense negotiating.

Woodside argued that Timor Leste then wanted to change the terms of the agreements, tieing the disputed maritime boundary between the two countries to the hydrocarbons sharing agreement.

Timor Leste prime minister Dr Mari Alkitiri told this journalist at a gas to liquids conference in Perth in 2002 that the two issues were categorically not related.