The Woodside-operated Karratha gas plant in Western Australia, part of the North West Shelf project, has shipped its 6000th cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Woodside announced this milestone cargo via social media on Sunday.
The North West Shelf project has delivered “reliable energy to local and global customers for almost 40 years,” Woodside said without providing any additional information regarding the shipment.
According to Woodside’s image above, the 147,000-cbm Energy Frontier, owned by a joint venture of Japan’s MOL and Tokyo Gas, picked up the milestone cargo.
The 2003-built Moss vessel was on Monday heading towards Japan’s Himeji LNG terminal, its AIS data provided by VesselsValue shows.
Besides operator Woodside, other partners in the NWS project include Chevron, BP, Shell, and Japan Australia LNG.
The project’s Karratha gas plant on Burrup peninsula has five LNG trains with a capacity of 16.9 million tonnes per year. Also, it features domestic gas trains, condensate stabilization units, and LPG units.
Australia’s oldest LNG plant has been liquefying gas from fields located off the north-west coast of Australia since 1989.
However, these fields are slowly running out of gas and the project is now shifting its focus towards a different business model aimed at processing gas from third parties.
Woodside and its NWS LNG venture partners signed two agreements in December last year to process gas through the project’s facilities.
Earlier this year, Woodside started sending gas from its Pluto offshore field to the LNG plant at Karratha ahead of schedule.
This accelerated production of Pluto gas followed the start-up of the Pluto-KGP Interconnector.