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.