About the Project

Australia Pacific LNG draws on the extensive experience of Origin, the largest integrated energy company operating across Australia and New Zealand, and ConocoPhillips, a multinational energy company with assets and operations in nearly 40 countries.

The proposed Australia Pacific LNG Project will use world-class CSG reserves in Queensland and ConocoPhillips' proven Optimized Cascade© LNG technology that is well-suited to CSG.

Australia Pacific LNG is currently focussed on the development of its existing CSG fields in the Surat and Bowen basins and also plans to construct a gas transmission pipeline approximately 450 kilometres long from the CSG fields to an LNG plant at Gladstone.

The Gladstone LNG plant will initially consist of two LNG processing trains each with a processing capacity of up to 18 million tonnes per annum (mtpa).

On 21 April 2011, Australia Pacific LNG and China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) signed a Sale and Purchase Agreement for the supply of 4.3 million tonnes per annum of LNG for 20 years from Australia Pacific LNG's world-class coal seam gas resources.

Australia Pacific LNG and Sinopec also signed an agreement for Sinopec to subscribe for a 15 per cent interest in Australia Pacific LNG thereby reducing ConocoPhillips' and Origin Energy's ownership interest on completion to 42.5 per cent respectively.

Production facilities

Origin operates the following CSG gas processing facilities in Queensland:

• Kincora
• Peat
• Rolleston
• Spring Gully
• Strahblane
• Taloona
• Talinga
• Yellowbank

Origin also has interests in the Fairview and Kenya gas processing facilities.

Cleaner power for domestic customers and export markets

Australia Pacific LNG is already the largest producer of CSG in Australia, supplying residential, commercial and industrial customers as well as supplying gas to Origin's gas-fired power station at Darling Downs.

As a combined cycle gas-fired power station, Darling Downs is one of the cleanest baseload power stations in Australia in terms of carbon emissions. Today, approximately 30 per cent of Queensland energy is met by CSG.

CSG will also supply Australia Pacific LNG's LNG plant, creating a major new export industry in Queensland and also providing countries in Asia with cleaner sources of energy.

Water management

One of the challenges faced by the CSG industry is water management, because water extracted from the coal seams during the drilling process is not immediately useable due its salt content. To combat this problem, the water is treated at a reverse osmosis plant which separates the water into a concentrated brine and a usable clean water stream which can be used for industrial and construction purposes, for irrigation and to supplement environmental flows in local rivers.

Origin and Australia Pacific LNG pioneered the adaptation of reverse osmosis technology to treat CSG water and was the first to apply it to Australia CSG industry. We continue to work on this and other CSG-related water matters, including monitoring the potential impact of the CSG industry on groundwater in the Great Artesian Basin. We are contributing to research, development and monitoring programs to ensure we find the most appropriate solutions, or set of solutions, to minimise any impact of CSG activities on precious water resources.

Read the case study:

• CSG water: Working towards the right solutions  from Origin's 2010 Sustainability Report