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Gold/Mining/Energy : Lundin Oil (LOILY, LOILB Sweden) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greywolf who wrote (1782)	8/20/2000 4:41:55 PM
From: Tomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2742

Chevron, Papua New Guinea Gas Pipeline Talks Continue Dow Jones Business News, August 18 CANBERRA - Talks aimed at settling the tax and fiscal terms covering an ambitious natural gas pipeline between Papua New Guinea and Australia are unfinished but the outlook is positive , Cliff Leggoe, external affairs manager of an Australian unit of Chevron, the project's operator, said Friday. He told of ongoing high level dialogue between the central governments of the two nations, the Queensland state government, PNG regional administrations and the project proponents. 'We remain highly confident that we'll have in the near term an agreement that benefits all parties,' he told Dow Jones Newswires. 'We have been aiming for the end of the month, and we're still holding to that, but things are a whole lot more complex when you get into them than when you set out, so whether we hold that or not I don't know,' he said. Joseph Gabut, long-time head of PNG's Department of Petroleum and Energy, said late June the fiscal and tax negotiations with Chevron can be completed by August. The US$3.5 billion project is scheduled for completion by the second half of 2004 after construction of a 3,250 kilometer pipeline, which would be the longest in the southern hemisphere. The pipeline will travel from gas fields in Papua New Guinea's highlands, go under the Torres Strait, to a string of cities and ports, electricity generators, minerals processors and industrial sites along Queensland's decentralized eastern seaboard. The project will include stripping condensate at a rate of 15,000 barrels a day and liquefied petroleum gas from the natural gas at a site near PNG's south coast. More than 1 million metric tons of LPG could be stripped from the gas in total, making it a major LPG operation. Size Of Stakes A Moving Feast Now Leggoe said he is pleased with where the negotiations are now, but plenty remains to be done. He couldn't detail the exact percentages of stakeholders in the project as these haven't been finalized. 'It's a bit of a moving feast and that will all be sorted out in the cooperative development agreement, which is between all the participants, which we're working on right now,' he said. The project is based on exploiting a total of 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in the highlands over 30 years. Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) is involved through its ownership of a major gas field that will supply part of the project. Also involved in gas supply are Australian companies Oil Search Ltd. (A.OSH) and Santos Ltd. (STOSY). Gabut said in June that with gas sales estimated at 1.1 billion kina, or A$500 million a year, the pipeline project could expand PNG's gross domestic product now to around PGK10 billion, an expansion of 12.6%. Development of the pipeline should help develop PNG's domestic gas market, which could include electricity generation, and the production of fertilizers and other petrochemicals, he said.