Papua New Guinea has allowed the Papua LNG Project to proceed in accordance with the gas agreement reached with the previous administration, in April 2019. The country was seeking to renegotiate the terms of the contract with the project’s operator Total, after a new government took power in May 2019, promising better conditions for the state and the citizens of Papua New Guinea.
Even if Total refused to renegotiate the financial terms of the agreement, it pledged to develop a local content plan for the project, to allow third-party access to the project’s pipelines, to open future negotiation about a public participation in the pipelines and to consider the use of LNG tankers belonging to the Papua New Guinean state oil company, Kumul Petroleum.
The US$13bn Papua LNG project is a 5.4 Mt/year export project to the developing Elk and Antelope gas fields in the Papua New Guinea Gulf province. It consists of two 2.7 Mt/year trains that would be developed in synergy with the existing 6.9 Mt/year PNG LNG plant (two 3.45 Mt/year trains commissioned in 2014). The final investment decision (FID) is scheduled for late-2019 and new trains could be commissioned as early as 2023-2024. The project, developed by Total, ExxonMobil and Oil Search, is part of a US$13bn plan to double Papua New Guinea's LNG exports. ExxonMobil and Oil Search are also taking part in the development of the P'nyang gas field under the same plan.
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