Woodside Petroleum is making offshore contractors bide their time as the Australian operator prepares to start the offshore pre-front end engineering and design phase of the US$15 billion Browse liquefied natural gas project.

The operator was expected to have by now issued invitations to tender to select contractors for several pre-FEED contracts.

A pre-qualification exercise was carried out in early 2018, and sources said Woodside knows which companies it will invite to bid but has not confirmed this with the contractors themselves.

The base-case development scenario for Browse comprises two 90,000-tonne floating production, storage and offloading vessels and a 900-kilometre subsea pipeline to the existing North West Shelf LNG plant at Karratha.

Separate pre-FEED contracts will be up for grabs for the FPSOs, the pipeline and the subsea infrastructure, said sources.

Major offshore contractors such as Aker Solutions, Fluor, KBR, McDermott, Saipem, Subsea 7, TechnipFMC, Wood Group and WorleyParsons are understood to be positioning themselves to participate in the pre-FEED process.

The two 360-metre-long FPSOs will be newbuilds and are almost certain to be built on an owner-operator basis.

There is no clear guidance as yet on the planned throughput capacity of the FPSOs.

However, Woodside’s latest guidance is that Browse will produce 10 million tonnes per annum of LNG, which equates to more than 1 billion cubic feet per day of gas.

Woodside also revealed last month some of its thinking around the construction strategy for the FPSOs.

Chief executive Peter Coleman said Browse development costs had come down mostly through drilling optimisation, improved facility design definition, and a more competitive contracting market.

“The FPSO topsides will be large, but well within industry tolerance,” said Coleman.

“The hull lengths have been designed such that we can get competition from a number of yards. The hulls will be built in one yard and the topsides elsewhere, then matched up. That allows us to bring China yards into the equation.”

“Previously those norms were Korean, but for us the Korean market does not have the same ability on cost structure.”

The immediate priority for the Browse joint venture is to finalise a tolling agreement with the North West Shelf joint ventures, which is expected this month.

Sources said the pre-FEED tendering could begin once this agreement is out of the way.

The target schedule for Browse is to enter concept definition, or pre-FEED, in the third quarter this year, and FEED in the fourth quarter next year.

The Browse joint venture comprises Woodside on 30.6%, Shell on 27%, BP on 17.33%, Mitsubishi-Mitsui (MiMi) on 14.4% and PetroChina on 10.67%.

The North West Shelf co-owners are Woodside, Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP and MiMi, on equal one-sixth interests.

The Browse scheme covers three fields — Torosa, Brecknock and Calliance — in water depths of up to 750 metres.

They contain a combined best estimate contingent resource of 13.9 trillion cubic feet of gas and 390 million barrels of condensate, which is a downward revision based on a recent reassessment of the Torosa field.

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Browse bidders remain on pre-FEED tenterhooks