ConocoPhillips Australia, as operator of the Barossa joint venture, has awarded three engineering contracts for the front-end engineering design (FEED) phase on the Barossa offshore project.
Barossa is an offshore gas and light condensate project that proposes to provide a new source of gas to the existing Darwin LNG (DLNG) facility, subject to suitable commercial arrangements being put in place.
The offshore development concept includes a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility, subsea production system, and gas export pipeline, located in Commonwealth waters 300 kilometres north of Darwin.
The existing DLNG infrastructure owners are assessing several options to backfill the facility from 2023 when the current offshore gas supply from Bayu-Undan is expected to be exhausted.
FEED for the FPSO facility will be conducted as a design competition between two contractor groups. Following a bid process, separate FPSO FEED contracts have been awarded to MODEC and to a consortium between TechnipFMC and Samsung Heavy Industries.
FEED for the subsea infrastructure (umbilicals, flowlines and risers) and gas export pipeline has been awarded to INTECSEA.
ConocoPhillips Australia West President, Chris Wilson , said: “Conducting Barossa FPSO FEED as a design competition continues our focus on strong cost discipline, which enables Barossa to compete both in our global portfolio and as a leading candidate to backfill DLNG.”
“Barossa is the first potential DLNG backfill project to progress into the FEED phase, positioning it strongly to secure access to the DLNG capacity following the end of production at Bayu-Undan. We look forward to working together with our selected FEED contractors to develop sufficient certainty of cost, schedule and execution planning to support a final investment decision (FID) at the end of 2019.”