LNG

Shell Plc, Europe’s largest energy company, has issued a first-quarter 2023 earnings forecast update with higher natural gas production and “higher uptime” at the Queensland Curtis LNG and Prelude FLNG plants in Australia.

Origin Energy, the Australian upstream supplier to the Australia-Pacific LNG export plant in Queensland facing a A$18.4 billion (US$12.3 billion) buyout offer from a two-firm consortium led by Canada's Brookfield Asset Management, said the due diligence on the deal was largely completed.

Origin said in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange that it was continuing its “active engagement” with Brookfield and consortium partner MidOcean Energy, an LNG company formed and managed by US-based energy investor EIG.

“Origin advises that the Consortium has substantially completed due diligence and active engagement continues on a non-exclusive basis in relation to the submission of a binding proposal,” said Origin.

The Sydney-based company noted that any binding proposal would be subject to a number of conditions, including approval by Australian regulators.

“At this stage, shareholders do not need to take any action and Origin will continue to keep shareholders updated in accordance with its continuous disclosure obligations,” said the company.

Origin’s business comprises Integrated Gas with its feed-gas sales to Australia-Pacific LNG and a utilities and domestic power markets unit, the Energy Markets division.

This is made up of retail and wholesale electricity sales and natural gas supplies to the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

Targeted

The bid for Origin from Brookfield comes after its offer in 2022 to buy Australia's leading utility, AGL Energy, was rejected.

The Origin buy-out proposal was made through the Brookfield Global Transition Fund, which is co-run by Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England.

Under the proposal to acquire Origin, Brookfield would take over the company’s Energy Markets business, while MidOcean Energy, in the form of EIG, would take control of Origin's Integrated Gas business, including its 27.5 percent stake in APLNG.

The APLNG plant stake that would go to EIG’s MidOcean under the Origin buy-out is a supplier to China and one of its shareholders is China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, known as Sinopec.

Origin is the main upstream operator for coal-seam gas supply to the facility while US major ConocoPhillips is the plant operator.

APLNG came on stream in 2016 and has two liquefaction Trains with total nameplate capacity of around 9 million tonnes per annum with about 7 MTPA going to China.

The plant sits alongside two other CSG-to-LNG facilities on Curtis Island, the Shell-run Queensland Curtis LNG plant and the Gladstone plant, operated by Santos.

Bechtel Inc., the dominant US liquefaction plant and energy engineering company that once constructed three export facilities in Queensland in Australia alongside each other, said it would join with researchers from two American universities to develop technologies for living and working on the Moon.

The research awards were announced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) after it selected proposals from the Colorado School of Mines and Missouri Science & Technology.

“Bechtel started as a frontier company more than 120 years ago,” said Mike Costas, general manager of Bechtel’s Defense and Space business line.

“Now, we’re thinking about the next frontier. What will it take to build permanent infrastructure on the Moon? What an exciting time,” stated Costas.

Most of the current LNG export plants being constructed or proposed along the US Gulf Coast are in the hands of Bechtel.

One of the company’s most notable feats was building the three Australian LNG export plants Queensland Curtis LNG, Gladstone LNG and Australia-Pacific LNG and bringing the six processing Trains onstream between 2014 and 2016.

Bechtel said its selected projects will receive up to $2 million over two years to develop their technologies and the company founded in San Francisco and with main offices in Houston, Texas, will serve as an industrial partner to both teams.

Autonomous construction

“Autonomous Construction - Humans living on the Moon will need structures like habitats and landing pads, which can be made more efficiently if they're constructed autonomously by robots,” explained Bechtel.

“Colorado School of Mines, led by principal investigator Christopher Dreyer, will develop tools and methods for autonomous landing pad construction on the Moon's surface,” it added.

The other award is for “Extracting Resources - Supplies for lunar astronauts” and could be created from what's already on the lunar surface, a process called in-situ resource utilization.

“Missouri S&T, led by principal investigator Leslie Gertsch, will use magnetic and electrostatic technologies to more efficiently separate calcium-containing and aluminum-containing minerals from the Moon's soil, called regolith, to extract materials suitable for construction on the lunar surface,” said Bechtel.

Bechtel said that this was the perfect opportunity to collaborate with the engineering schools.

“Tackling the challenge of building on the Moon will require the know-how of what’s already been done in Earth’s harshest environments, combined with new thinking and approaches,” said Costas.

Woodside Petroleum, the Western Australian LNG operator of the North West Shelf plant and Pluto LNG, has signed an agreement to sell US fund Global Infrastructure Partners a 49 percent non-operating participating interest for an agreed initial US$2.744 billion in the Pluto Train 2 joint venture.

Australian utility Origin Energy has sold a 10 percent shareholding in the Australia-Pacific LNG plant in Queensland for A$2.12Bln (US$1.58Bln) to a global investment fund.

Operators in the LNG business are assessing the possible impact of the US Defense Department’s blacklisting of China National Offshore Oil Corp., the nation’s largest LNG importer, to its list of alleged “Communist Chinese military companies”, causing CNOOC shares to drop and further raising US-China trade tensions.