The award follows the award to Clough on April 11 of the engineering, procurement and construction contract to develop the onshore gas processing facilities at Devil Creek.

Clough will transport and install an unmanned minimum facilities wellhead platform and lay a single 100km raw gas pipeline to the Devil Creek plant, about 65km southwest of Karratha.

The pipelay and platform installation work will be performed by the upgraded Java Constructor, while the beach pull and pipeline stabilisation work will be carried out from the Clough Challenge.

Engineering work will start immediately with offshore construction planned for the second half of 2009 to be completed by the end of next year.

Reindeer is located in permit WA-209-P, which is operated by Apache Energy (55%) in partnership with Santos (45%).

The field was discovered in 1997 and has a gross recoverable resource range of 410-640 petajoules (390-610 billion cubic feet) of gas.

All gas produced from Devil Creek will service the WA domestic gas market, and this output will significantly bolster the security of supply and mitigate forecast gas supply shortfalls, Apache said.