It has been a long road for Inpex to reach the pre-front-end engineering and design stage for the onshore liquefaction project to exploit its deep-water giant Abadi gas field, which was discovered in 2000, writes Amanda Battersby.

Fast forward some seven years to 2007 and the operator was understood to have had JGC, KBR and the-then Technip working on preliminary engineering and design studies for a floating liquefaction-based development plan, with the aim of production start-up around 2016.

The Indonesian authorities back in December 2010 approved a Plan of Development for the field.

Inpex then more than five years ago launched the FEED work for its then-touted phased floating LNG solution for Abadi, which would have produced an initial 2.5 million tonnes per annum.

Wood Group was awarded subsea FEED work, while consortia led by JGC and Saipem had parallel FEED contracts for the FLNG vessel.

Inpex subsequently drilled three further appraisal wells on the gas structure and the resulting reserves increase led Inpex to propose a much larger 7.5 million tpa FLNG project – the revised POD for which was submitted in September 2015.

However, the following April, Inpex and co-venturer Shell, which joined the venture in 2011, were thrown a curveball when the Indonesian authorities asked them to re-propose a POD based on onshore liquefaction.

The partners' FLNG ambitions were eventually dealt a final blow when none other than Indonesian President Joko Widodo vetoed the FLNG concept in favour of onshore liquefaction.

Indonesian government officials last year said that three location options, likely on either Aru or Saumlaki Island, remained on the table while the original planned Abadi phased project envisaged a second phase onshore development on Tanimbar Island.

“The government has no specific preference regarding location,” Indonesia’s Minister of Energy & Mineral Resources, Ignasius Jonan, has said.

However, he claimed in 2017 that he had an assurance from Inpex chief executive Toshiaki Kitamura that the onshore location of the Abadi liquefaction facilities would be decided before the FEED work got under way.

One issue that is also expected to be determined during the pre-FEED work is the production capacity.

Sources maintain that the likely liquefaction capacity at Abadi will be 9.5 million tpa, with some 150 million cubic feet of pipeline gas also being made available to local industries and other customers.

Weekly

End of the long road to onshore pre-FEED is finally in sight