Coleman told analysts in yesterday's conference call on Woodside's second half earnings report that "at the top of the house across all the joint venturers, we're fully aligned as to what we need to do to get the project going. There's no doubt in that regard".

Speaking directly to speculation about Browse's viability, Coleman said: "We didn't move into FEED [front-end engineering and design] on a hope and a prayer".

"We [did so] with the belief that we can get the project over the line, but we also are under no delusion that there's some more work to do, and the majority of that work to do is on the cost structure on the downstream part of the project," he said.

Woodside has indicated it was seeing cost reductions of up to 30% in the upstream part of the floating LNG project - above previous targets of 20% flagged at APPEA 2015.

"The upstream is the drilling, subsea flow lines and SURF [subsea umbilicals, risers and flow lines] - the things Woodside will be directly responsible for in the project's development," Coleman said.

"On the downstream, we still have work to do, and we needed to get into the FEED part of the project to knuckle down on that work and firm up what we can do with respect to the construction costs in the yard in Korea and getting efficiencies as best we can do now."

Further strengthening his claims about the strength of the project, Coleman said LNG buyer interest had ramped up since it entered FEED.

"One of the keys is to get a real project, and in today's environment buyers are reluctant to enter into meaningful conversations unless you have, in their mind, a real project to consider," Coleman said.

"Now that Browse has gone into FEED we have a real project, so the buyer interest now has gone up quite significantly, and we'll be aggressively marketing Browse through H2 this year."

In fact, Coleman said he expects to be able to update progress on this by early next year.

"We've got some choices we need to make with respect to how much volume we place in the market, what the phasing of that volume needs to be, and the buyer group that we want, and we have strategies all around that," he added.

"We're well progressed in the buying strategies but we have some other things we need to do, and we're targeting the opening up of other markets, though our focus is on our traditional buyers at this point."

Woodside is still targeting mid-to-late 2016 for the final investment decision, which Coleman said would "line up nicely" with completion of activities on Shell's Prelude FLNG project in the yard in Korea.

"So Prelude will be out of the yard around the same time that we're going to FID. That's good news for us in that regard … [as it was] one of the key things for us in trying to de-risk the project," Coleman said.

Having said in May that Browse's rate of return would be toward the lower end of Woodside's targeted 12-15% for new ventures, he told analysts yesterday that the stark reality of today's price environment meant the goal was simply to just breakeven.

"We're likely to be making a decision on the investment at a point in time when the oil price is not reflecting our long-term view of oil pricing, and we've been very clear with our project teams and our partners, the project will need to deliver an acceptable return at the current expectations of oil pricing," he said.

"That means it needs to breakeven at the sorts of low oil prices that we're seeing in the market place today - and that's not a 12% return, that's breakeven.

"With the current low range of returns of DCF [discounted cash flow] 12-15%, that needs to be delivered at our long-term forecast.

"So the investment decision will be made with two considerations: what's our expectation of long-term oil pricing, and does that meet our investment criteria; then equally, in a world where oil prices never recover, can we assure ourselves that in fact the investment will breakeven at those sorts of prices.

"That's a pretty harsh test."

He said this "breakeven" was on a weighted average cost of capital, "plus a little bit - you want to put some margin in there".

In a departure from tradition, he said each joint venture partners would make their own choices around their own investment tests, which was a "change in style" but necessary given "we don't want to get caught like our industry has historically in betting on ‘the future's always going to be better than today'".

"We need to assure ourselves that we can manage this project, phase the spending and manage the cost and price expectations appropriately."