Woodside has just announced that the upstream component of the Scarborough gas resource (located in the Carnarvon Basin, approximately 375 km west-north-west of the Burrup) will be accelerated and made ready for its startup in 2023. The development will be made downstream ready for the following year to maximise market opportunity.

The location of the Scarborough gas development is estimated to hold 7.3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of stored dry gas. Woodside has proposed to develop the resource with 12 subsea, high-rate gas wells tied back to a semi-submersible platform moored in 900 m of water close to the Scarborough field. A 430km pipeline route will transport the gas to the existing Western Australian onshore Pluto LNG facilities.

Previously, the company stated that a front-end engineering and design (FEED) entry will be announced for the project in Q1 2019, with predicted plans to hold a final investment decision (FID) in 2020, but after Woodside’s most recent announcement, plans for this are being fast-tracked.

A deepwater geophysical pre-engineering route survey commenced earlier this year to determine if the company could extend the Scarborough gas field by approximately 300km towards the Burrup Peninsula. At the same time, Woodside shared they have increased the design capacity of the proposed Pluto Train 2, from four to five million tonnes per annum.

More information on this project can be accessed here.