Woodside CEO Don Voelte said the Sunrise partners (Woodside, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Osaka Gas) had probably lost the window to market Sunrise gas, and the company was now focused on commercialising its vast Carnarvon and Browse Basin gas reserves. This would involve developing a new hub based on the Browse and using the recent Pluto discovery as the foundation for a sixth North West Shelf LNG train.

Woodside will start next month on the planned $10 billion development of the Browse Basin LNG project off the northern West Australian coast.

The basin’s large gas fields – Brecknock, Brecknock South and Scott Reef – were discovered in the 1970s but have not yet been developed. Woodside believes the right market conditions for their development have now emerged.

LNG demand is surging in Asia, and India has now emerged as a potential major customer in the same league as China, Korea and Japan.

Woodside is now committed to drilling three Browse appraisal wells aimed at confirming the Browse project's underpinning gas resource, which is estimated at more than 20 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The first two wells will start late next month on Brecknock. A third well on the Brecknock South field will follow in August. The work program is aimed at ensuring that the project can move into a front-end engineering and design stage in 2007-08 ahead of first production by 2011-12.

While equities vary over four separate permits, Woodside has an aggregate of about 50% interest in the Browse compared with 16.66% in the North West Shelf.

So while the Browse would not be as large as the North West Shelf it could be twice as important to Woodside as the older project, Woodside has said. More than 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of condensate could be recovered from Browse, according to Woodside.