Australia's Woodside Energy and East Timor have agreed to study sending gas from the large, undeveloped Greater Sunrise fields to a new liquefied natural gas plant in the Southeast Asian nation that could start exporting in the next seven years.
The agreement calls for the two sides to study the commercial and technical viability of a five-million-tonne project, with a high-level plan to start producing LNG as early as 2032-2035, Woodside and East Timor's petroleum and mineral resources ministry said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
That marks the first time the two sides, long at loggerheads over development of the fields which lie between East Timor and Australia, have outlined a potential start-up date.
"The TLNG project presents the best economic, social, and strategic benefits for the people of Timor-Leste, and we are committed to working constructively with Woodside, the Greater Sunrise joint venture and other parties,” East Timor's Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister, Francisco da Costa Monteiro, said.
The project would include a domestic gas plant and a helium extraction plant. Helium commands a high premium owing to its scarcity and use in the semiconductor industry.
Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill said the agreement would address remaining issues such as a downstream commercial structure to attract financing and to better understand "the preferred route of the gas export pipeline".
The deep Timor Trough is seen as one of the hurdles for a gas pipeline from the Greater Sunrise fields to East Timor.
Dili has long pressed for Sunrise gas to be sent to a new LNG export plant in East Timor and not to Darwin in northern Australia.
Woodside has long resisted, arguing it is not cost effective, although O’Neill had suggested smaller "modular" LNG processing units could be built in East Timor to cut costs.
Alongside the study, fiscal, regulatory and legal frameworks to support the upstream development of the fields need to be negotiated between the Sunrise Joint Venture, East Timor and Australian governments, the statement said.
A maritime boundary was agreed by the two nations in 2018.
(Reporting by Helen Clark; Editing by Sonali Paul)