BP names consortium for Indonesia LNG pipeline

Resumen de Prensa            Enervía, lunes, 28 abril 2003

FUENTE: Financial Times


BP said on Friday it had named a consortium led by US construction group Kellogg Brown & Root as the winning bidder for a US$1.4bn contract to build a new liquid natural gas processing plant for its Tangguh Project in the Indonesian province of Papua.


BP in Jakarta said it had to negotiate a final contract with the consortium, which includes Japan's JGC Corporation and Indonesian firm, Pertafenikki Engineering. KB&R is a division of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company formerly headed by Dick Cheney, US vice president.

"We're on schedule to meet our market commitments in 2007," the BP spokesman said. "Today's announcement puts us on track to do that."

BP and its contractors have already begun work at the site of the Tangguh project.

They are in the process of starting the relocation of the residents of a village at the site. BP contractors will soon begin construction on a new village about 3km away and have already completed the refurbishment of a World War II air strip in the nearby town of Babo, to be used as a base of operations.

The tender - awarded on Friday - covers the engineering, procurement and construction of the LNG facilities to be built at Tangguh. The plan calls for the building of a two-train LNG processing plant and relevant support facilities.

Also bidding for the work were two other consortia led respectively by San Francisco-based Bechtel and Technip, the French engineering and construction group.

Some 7m tonnes of LNG a year are expected to eventually be piped out of the Tangguh gas field.

The project was delayed after it lost a bid to supply 3m tonnes of LNG to China's Guangdong province to Australia's Woodside-led northwest shelf project last year. But it has since secured a 25-year contract to sell 2.6m tonnes annually to Fujian province beginning in 2007.

As part of that deal, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) paid $275m for a 12.5 per cent stake in the Tangguh project.