Richard Moore, who spent 10 years at Woodside after starting his career with ExxonMobil in the Bass Strait, won the Industry Innovation prize at Subsea Energy Australia's awards last Friday for his start-up SubCool Technologies.

SubCool officially started in 2015 when he inked a deal with global engineering and project management firm Intecsea to help develop the technology, building on the patents he secured in 2012 which he presented to OTC in Houston, having previously consulted for Murphy Oil.

While that presentation gathered some interest at the time, it didn't appear to the "ultimate solution", so he worked on it further and by 2014 had developed a new solution to develop deepwater gas fields more efficiently and for lower capital and operating costs.

Moore calls the technology a ‘hybrid concept' that is neither wholly subsea nor surface processing, but an "optimal combination" of both based on fully processing the gas subsea, including subsea dehydration.

The concept incorporates a compact, low pressure surface facility for liquids processing, and providing "unlimited" distance capability.

Importantly, Moore says, all components are proven and require a minimum of technical development, so deployment should not be a huge obstacle.

It also improves safety, as it requires a significantly reduced permanent offshore workforce, a problem that was acutely brought into public attention when Woodside suffered a compression malfunction on the Ngujima-Yin floating, production, storage and offloading vessel at the Vincent field.

While the fire was put out and safely handled, the system couldn't be repaired offshore because there were logistical issues, including getting sufficient resources to repair the compressor, which meant it needed to be sent to Singapore.

SubCool's technology removes these risks.

"Concentration of risk" is a key risk for operators, and floating LNG does exactly that by concentrating everything on a single vessel.

SubCool, on the other hand, spreads the risk by having something very simple on the surface and subsea with a pipeline back to shore.

While in Western Australia this would mean the gas is subject to the 15% domestic reservation rule, it would also mean more local jobs which would otherwise be taken elsewhere for that stage of development via FLNG.

Moore's plan ultimately ties in with what Wood Mackenzie lead analyst for Australasia Saul Kavonic told this year's APPEA conference would be the future of LNG in Australia: tying back deepwater fields to existing onshore LNG infrastructure, which Woodside CEO Peter Coleman is open to.

"We're in discussions with Woodside," Moore told Energy News, adding that it could be a solution for both Browse and the diplomatically troubled Greater Sunrise project.

"SubCool provides an easy-to-develop gas fields option back to shore - and that shore can be East Timor or Darwin [for Greater Sunrise]. Indonesia has axed the offshore option for Abadi, so it could also be brought back to Indonesia using SubCool technology."

Moore's choice of development partner appears particularly prescient given Woodside was in talks with Intecsea in the first quarter of 2015 for Browse when FLNG was the outright preferred solution.

SubCool is not necessarily in competition with FLNG, however, as it could be used to extend the life of either onshore LNG or FLNG hubs, and it is in this way that Browse could find some benefits.

"You may only need one or two surface facilities, certainly not three [for Browse], using SubCool hybrid technology, so there are savings there," he said.

"Clearly I still see there's a space for a small number of one-off FLNG units that still work, but we see the space for SubCool hybrid concept being much, much bigger - taking a really long-term view of developing gas fields in the future.

"You could use SubCool hybrid to tie into an FLNG unit potentially 150km away, which is why it's not strictly competing with FLNG.

"Once we get [the technology] proven we will expand, and SubCool hybrid will be the method to develop offshore gas fields. That may be 10 years away, but that's not a long time in the greater scheme of things."

Recent research forecast the global FLNG market to reach a capital expenditure of $US7.17 billion ($A9.3 billion) this year, with the liquefaction part of the market worth $5.06 billion, and the regasification part of the market seeing capex of $2.11 billion.