In my previous blog I mentioned that Australia was becoming a leading player in the world LNG Market. However there has been some warning signs around the cost base in Australia, notably from Chevron, but other companies have been making similar noises. Last week, for example, the Santos/GDF Suez partnership for the Bonaparte Field in the Timor Sea was cancelled as an FLNG concept, due to excessive costs, the partnership will now look at pipeline concepts for this field and others that they have in the Timor Sea area.
In the medium term, rising costs in Australia are a real threat to the LNG business, as the US, Canada and later, East Africa all enter the market.
Shell has also completed its sale of their share in Woodside projects, selling to the equity markets and to a Woodside share buy back.
In Canada the authorities have approved a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. This will link the Western Canadian oil fields with potential Pacific Rim exports. This will be the subject of environmental and Native American debates before work starts however.
This pipeline will complement the Chevron/Apache Gas pipeline across British Colombia to Kitimat where an LNG Plant is proposed. There are all told six proposals for new pipelines across British Colombia.
On the East Coast US approval has been given for an LNG liquefaction and export facility on what was originally a re-gas site at Huckberry Louisiana.
The API is lobbying hard for these approvals to be speeded up.
Staying with gas, Statoil has announced a further significant find offshore Tanzania, whilst BG has found small amounts of oil offshore Kenya.
Amoco found ‘Old Oil ‘ on Madagascar in the 1980s- I wonder if this will be investigated further given the gas finds off Mozambique?
The oil price seems to be hovering around the $114 mark for Brent given the unrest in the Middle East- interestingly Kurdistan has now delivered its third load of crude via Ceyhan in Turkey- their Oil Minister predicts up to 400.000 bbl/day by the end of the year.
Closer to home an interesting spin last week for the subsea businesses in “Surf City’ at Westhill. Lockheed Martin visited Aberdeen looking to engage with the industry to look at seabed harvesting of high value mineral nodules for which they have been granted a licence to exploit. The skill sets seem to be almost identical to those for oil and gas — lets see what happens.
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