Woodside is holding off on awarding a front-end engineering and design contract for the Browse liquefied natural gas development in Australia until the project’s co-owners are comfortable with certain aspects of the scheme.

The FEED contractor for the two large floating production, storage and offloading vessels was due to have been selected by now, if not officially then at least provisionally.

However, sources said Woodside and its joint venture partners are not quite ready as they have asked contractors to do more work on validating various aspects of the project before the FEED is formally awarded.

Aker Solutions, KBR and TechnipFMC were the original competitors for the FEED contract, but sources said it is now a two-horse race between Aker and KBR.

The winner of the FEED contract is likely to be retained for the engineering, procurement and project management role.

IntecSea Engineering had previously carried out conceptual work on the two FPSOs, while KBR is still working on a concept definition study.

Sources said the FEED work cannot proceed until after KBR finishes the definition study.

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

The 90,000-tonne floaters are planned to have throughput capacity in excess of 1 billion cubic feet per day of gas given Woodside would like to generate between 10 million and 12 million tonnes per annum of LNG production from the Browse project.

Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman recently alluded to its Browse joint venture partners all being “supermajors in their own right” and their decision-making processes “take a little longer than it does for us as the operator”.

There was a suggestion that there might be a joint venture disagreement related to the LNG tolling agreement with the North West Shelf Venture but this was downplayed by sources.

A spokesperson for Woodside said there was no change to the Browse project’s schedule, which involves a final investment decision in late 2020.

It also involves executing a final gas processing agreement as soon as possible with the North West Shelf project owners.

The two sides have a non-binding agreement to process Browse gas through the North West Shelf LNG facilities. Woodside’s chief financial officer Sherry Duhe said recently the aim was to finalise the gas agreement in the first half of this year.

Coleman said recently that “all of the elements that pertain to pricing have already been agreed, and we’re now down to three or four elements that talk about risk and so forth, and capacity rights. It’s more the doing part of it now rather than the actual financial part of it."

Another aspect connected to the FPSOs is a pre-qualifying exercise for Asian offshore fabrication yards where both FPSOs will be built.

Woodside is due to shortlist three or four yards and then invite them to submit technical and commercial proposals in the third quarter this year, but the shortlist is not settled yet.

The yards being considered are Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, China’s Offshore Oil Engineering Company (COOEC), Cosco Shipping Heavy Industry and CIMC Raffles, Sembcorp Marine and Sapura Energy.

There are also bidding exercises under way for the turret mooring systems for the floaters.

The Browse project 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.

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 six equal-sharing North West Shelf co-owners are Woodside, Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP Billiton and Japan LNG.

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Browse LNG partners ease pace