Woodside Energy: Pluto outage cause still not clear with Burrup Peninsula plant offline

Officers from WA’s workplace regulator are taking a look at Monday’s emergency shutdown of Woodside Energy’s $15 billion Pluto gas plant. Pluto remained offline on Tuesday morning and the Perth-based company is still investigating the cause of the incident. The plant is on the Burrup Peninsula — near Karratha in the Pilbara — and processes natural gas to export into the huge Asian market. A WorkSafe Petroleum Safety & Dangerous Goods spokesman said the State regulator was “aware of a depressurisation and site muster at the Woodside Pluto facility”. “WorkSafe major hazard facilities officers are liaising with Woodside and making further enquiries into the matter,” he said. “There were no reported injuries.” It is not clear if inspectors from the regulator will visit the site. On Monday, a spokesman confirmed that “Woodside safely shut down the Pluto LNG facility due to an unplanned event”. But an emergency move to release the gas from the Pluto system sent the site’s emergency flare raging. “To maintain safety at the site, manual depressurisation of the train and offshore facilities was completed, leading to visible smoke from the flare,” he said. “All personnel on site are safe and accounted for.” The spokesman said the nearby Karratha Gas Plant was running as normal. That facility has five LNG processing trains, owned by the North West Shelf Venture, and operated by Woodside. Pluto will soon have as many as 1300 workers on site for the construction of a new train, in a $19b project to develop the Scarborough field off the State’s North West coast. The plant’s first stage cost $15bn and entered production in 2012. Shares in the ASX-listed petroleum play fell 3.8 per cent to $24.40. Woodside recently told investors the Pluto plant had run at 99.9 per cent reliability through the September quarter, bringing in about $U920m ($1.4b) revenue.