Perth’s Resources Technology Showcase 2019: The tech that made INPEX’s impossible Ichthys possible
INPEX’s Australian president director Hitoshi Okawa says the Japanese company’s $US45 billion Ichthys LNG project off the Kimberley coast is a story about how technology helps make the impossible possible.
Speaking on day two of the Resources Technology Showcase in Perth, Mr Okawa said Ichthys was one of the few energy projects worldwide to incorporate the whole chain of development and production: subsea, offshore, pipeline and onshore.
Widely regarded as one of the most technically complicated projects undertaken anywhere in the world, Ichthys was sanctioned in 2012, six years before production eventually began in 2018. The project celebrated its 100th cargo this month.
Mr Okawa told delegates at the Seven West Media-hosted event Ichthys had taken 50,000 people working at locations across the globe more than 400 million work hours to develop.
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“Without technology, we would not have succeeded,” he said.
The Ichthys field, which hosts 12 trillion cubic feet of gas and 500 million barrels of condensate, lies in the Browse Basin 220km off the Kimberley coast.
The project includes two massive offshore production facilities, the Ichthys Explorer central processing facility and the 336m-long Ichthys Venturer floating production storage and offloading facility, which is one of the most advanced FPSO facilities ever built.
“One of the interesting features is the fact that the FPSO (Venturer) and CPF (Explorer) are designed to work as one unit,” Mr Hitoshi said.
On the subsea side, Ichthys has some of the world’s most complex infrastructure, with more than 133,000 tonnes of equipment installed on the seabed.
The project is connected via an 890km pipeline to onshore processing facilities near Darwin.
About the distance from Sydney to Melbourne, it is the longest subsea pipeline in the southern hemisphere and the fifth longest on the planet.
At 107cm in diameter, it is constructed from more than 74,000 pipe joints, at about 20 tonnes each.
Mr Hitoshi said Inpex had adopted a modular construction approach to the project’s onshore facilities near Darwin to minimise the amount of building work required at the site, the environmental impacts and the effects on the local community.
“In a world first for an LNG facility, we have installed a 500MW combined cycle power plant to support the processing facilities,” he said.
“Rather than adopting the industry-standard approach of using single cycle gas turbine generators, we wanted to find ways of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and chose to incorporate a combined cycle power plant.
“Combined cycle is around 50 per cent more efficient than a traditional single cycle power plant.”
Mr Hitoshi said the dredging campaign, to make Darwin Harbour accessible to LNG carriers, was one of Ichthys’ construction success stories.
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“More than 16 million cubic metres of sediment was removed from the harbour, with minimal impact on the environment and fishing,” he said.
“We used the most powerful cutter suction dredge in the world at that time. This eliminated four months of drilling and blasting in the harbour.”
Mr Hitoshi said globally INPEX was targeting a 10 per cent mix of renewable energy initiatives across its portfolio by 2040.
“Here in Australia, we have invested in savanna fire management and bio-sequestration projects,” he said.
“We are also considering further projects to deliver energy in a sustainable way.”
Inpex is Japan’s biggest oil and gas exploration and production company, with more than 70 projects across 20 countries.
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