Woodside Petroleum has joined to new politicised trend for energy companies to make political investment decisions after several years of intimidation by banks and environmental activists on climate change by shutting down a natural gas project in Myanmar citing reasons of human rights.
The action follows similar pull-outs from the southeast Asian nation with decisions taken earlier in January 2022 by TotalEnergies and a unit of Chevron Corp. over a separate Myanmar gas project.
Just over a year after announcing that the A-6 Development offshore Myanmar had moved from exploration and appraisal to the pre-front-end engineering design phase Woodside is now withdrawing.
The Woodside natural gas project in Myanmar had envisaged a new 240-kilometres offshore pipeline to connect with existing links to the Myanmar capital Rangoon and another to Thailand.
The new Myanmar pipeline supplies would have competed with Thai LNG imports.
Woodside’s Myanmar development concept was for six wells in phase one in 2,300 metres water depth and a further four wells in phase two connected to the offshore Yadana platform complex.
The Block A-6 development within Woodside’s Southern Hub was being progressed alongside joint venture participants MPRL Exploration and Production of Myanmar and TotalEnergies.
Decision time
Woodside had previously announced that it was placing all Myanmar business decisions under review following the state of emergency declared last year and the “deteriorating human rights situation” in the country.
The Woodside action comes just before the February 1 first anniversary of the February 2021 coup d'état in Myanmar when democratically elected members of the country's ruling party were deposed by the Myanmar military.
Analysts note that multinationals and energy companies can more easily withdraw from Myanmar, a nation of 55 million people, than from China or several countries in the Middle East or Europe, which have also been accused of human rights abuses by the same organizations like Amnesty International and similar groups now elbowing away climate activists and pulling the strings of jumpy corporations.
They add that if the political situation changes for the better in Myanmar in the future the foreign companies like Woodside or TotalEnergies won't be going back in and re-opening things because of the previous lost investments.
