Western Gas Awards Oz Equus Contracts

Australian Western Gas has provisionally agreed to award McDermott International and Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE), the engineering, construction, installation and commissioning contract for its wholly-owned Equus project offshore Australia, it said December 12.

Equus has an independently certified resource of 2 trillion ft³ of gas and 42mn barrels of condensate, according to Western – enough for 2mn metric tons/yr of LNG for 20 years.

The Memorandum of Understanding is for the provision of drilling, subsea, offshore processing, nearshore LNG production and a gas pipeline to shore for domestic gas supply. McDermott and BHGE were also awarded a contract to support the planning phases of the project, and pre-front end engineering design studies will start immediately, Western said.

Western's CEO Andrew Leibovitch said the integrated design-to-install contracting approach "was an Australian first for a project of this size and scale and would help deliver an efficient development plan, enhance project economics and reduce time to first gas".

The final investment decision is planned for late 2019/early 2020 with gas supply from late 2023/early 2024.