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TotalEnergies has a 37.55 percent operating stake in the Papua LNG project, ExxonMobil has 37.04 percent, Santos owns a 22.83 percent interest, and JX Nippon holds 2.58 percent.
In April 2024, the partners delayed the project’s FID to 2025, saying that they needed to keep working with contractors to obtain “commercially viable” EPC contracts.
Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher said in August last year that the partners aim to take FID in the first quarter of 2026.
Pouyanne discussed the project during TotalEnergies’ earnings call on Wednesday.
“So the plan is to sanction in 2026. We’ll see. There are different work streams to put together because it’s CapEx, financing, and marketing,” he said.
“We should converge all of them by mid-year, I would say. It’s not done, but if we don’t manage to do it, now that we have, I think, optimized the CapEx, we don’t see what we could do better than what we have,” Pouyanne said.
“We are around $14-$15 billion, not at $18 billion, not at $12 billion,” he said.
“We have a clear discussion, a clear engagement with the government, and with the partners. We’ll see where we land, and we’ll have to take the decision in 2026,” Pouyanne said.
In March 2023, the Papua LNG partners launched fully-integrated front-end engineering and design (FEED) for the project, while TotalEnergies sold a small stake in the project to Japan’s JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration in June.
The project calls for the design of about 4 million tonnes per year of liquefaction capacity adjacent to the existing PNG LNG processing facilities, operated by ExxonMobil and located 20 kilometers northwest of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
The facility will receive supplies from the Elk-Antelope gas field.
Also, the project includes the use of 2 million tonnes per year of liquefaction capacity in the existing trains of PNG LNG.
