Bloomberg quoted director Masahiro Murayama as saying the company would not make the decision to go ahead with the project this year or start operations in 2015.
No reasons were given for the decision.
In November last year, Inpex said the complexity of the front-end engineering and design of the project in Darwin would result in a FID in late 2010 or early 2011, though Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson said the project was still expected to start producing in 2015.
"Inpex has probably been reviewing the structure of the Ichthys project's cost, at a time global gas demand growth is slowing briefly," Bloomberg quoted Mizuho Securities senior energy analyst Hidetoshi Shioda as saying.
The Ichthys LNG project includes plans for what could be the world's largest floating processing platform, capable of stripping out 100,000 barrels of condensate per day, as well as a subsea pipeline of more than 850 kilometres long to the onshore LNG plant at Blaydin Point in Darwin.
Ichthys will have an initial output of 8.4 million tonnes per annum of LNG from two trains. It will also produce about 1.6MMtpa of liquefied petroleum gas.
