Chevron Australia, together with its joint venture partners commemorated the Wheatstone liquefied natural gas project near Onslow, Western Australia.
Speaking at the ceremony, Chevron Australia managing director Nigel Hearne said Wheatstone is an asset that will contribute to the Australian economy for the next 40 years.
The project shipped its first ever cargo of the chilled fuel to Japan at the end of October. It is lauded as Australia’s first third-party natural gas hub enabling future development of the vast natural gas resources offshore Western Australia.
At full capacity, the Wheatstone project’s two train LNG facility is expected to contribute around six percent of the Asia Pacific region’s total future LNG production, delivering 8.9 mtpa of LNG for export to customers in Asia.
The project’s domestic gas plant also has the capacity to produce 200 terajoules per day of domestic gas for the Western Australian market. When combined with domestic gas from the Chevron-operated Gorgon LNG project, there is capacity to produce 500 terajoules per day which is 50 percent of current domestic gas supply in Western Australia, the company said in a statement.
The Chevron-operated Wheatstone LNG facility is a joint venture between Australian subsidiaries of Chevron (64.14 percent), Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KUFPEC) (13.4 percent), Woodside Petroleum (13 percent), and Kyushu Electric Power Company (1.46 percent), together with PE Wheatstone, part-owned by JERA (8 percent).
Chevron holds an 80.2 percent interest in the offshore licenses containing the Wheatstone and Iago fields.