Woodside’s Karratha gas plant hit by production outage

Australian LNG player Woodside said its Karratha gas plant had suffered an unexpected production outage on Saturday.

Work to restart production at the gas plant, which hosts the North West Shelf liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project, is underway, Reuters reported on Wednesday citing a Woodside spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman declined to say whether there had been an impact on LNG exports.

Industry sources said the outage had affected LNG exports and this was supporting spot LNG prices in Asia LNG-AS, which have been on a downward trend for months, according to the report.

The project spokeswoman said Karratha Gas Plant had experienced “a partial production outage” on Saturday afternoon.

“The site was mustered in accordance with our standard procedures and all personnel have returned to work as normal,” she added.

The cause of the outage was being investigated.

The Karratha gas plant is located some 1260 kilometres north of Perth, Western Australia. It is a part of the North West Shelf project facilities.

The Karratha gas plant facilities include five LNG processing trains, two domestic gas trains, six condensate stabilisation units, three LPG fractionation units as well as storage and loading facilities.

It has an annual LNG export capacity of 16.9 mtpa which is supplied mainly to companies in the Asia Pacific region.

Woodside operates these facilities on behalf of the NWS project participants. Other NWS JV partners are BHP Billiton, BP, Chevron, Japan Australia LNG (MIMI) and Shell.

LNG World News Staff