Inpex hits key financial milestone for $55 billion Darwin project

THE Inpex-operated $55 billion Ichthys LNG Project has achieved an important milestone

Inpex The $50 billion Darwin Ichthys LNG onshore processing facilities SUPPLIED

THE Inpex-operated $55 billion Ichthys LNG Project has achieved an important milestone with financial completion under its project financing agreements.

This releases Inpex and its joint venture participants from completion guarantee obligations to the lenders of the project.

A key part of financial completion involved satisfying a 90-day operational completion test where the operator needed to demonstrate the performance of the Ichthys liquefied natural gas facilities.

The project’s 90-day completion test ended successfully with no shutdowns and having recorded a production volume well exceeding figures required by the project financing contract.

By industry standards the time span of approximately 14 months from the project’s first LNG shipment in October 2018 until financial completion is shorter than the average for LNG projects of a similar scale.

The milestone comes just a week after the offshore regulator, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), approved Inpex’s Ichthys Phase 2 drilling campaign west of Darwin.

This will see the drilling, completion and flow back of at least 12–15 development wells within production licence WA-50-L.

WA-50-L is located approximately 230km northwest of the Kimberley coastline and water depths range between 235 and 275m at lowest astronomical tide.

A semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit with support from anchor handling supply vessels and platform supply vessels, will undertake the work.

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Drilling starts next year and will continue for up to five years, providing supply to the onshore Darwin plant.

The capacity of Ichthys’ onshore production facility is 8.9 million t, coming from two LNG processing trains, which can produce 100,000 bbl/d of condensate at peak and 1.65 million t/a of liquid petroleum gas.