Ichthys Venturer adventures off the WA coast

The INPEX-operated Ichthys LNG Project’s Floating facility (FPSO), ‘Ichthys Venturer’ has been safely moored in the Ichthys Field, 220 kilometres off the north coast of Western Australia.

‘The Ichthys project came under an Australian Industry Participation (AIP) plan in 2010,’ ICN Limited Executive Director, Derek Lark said.

‘Australian suppliers who wanted to work on the project needed to be registered on ICN Gateway, rather than engaging directly with INPEX.’

‘To support this process, the Australian Government provided funding through its Supplier Access to Major Projects (SAMP) program, which allowed ICN to allocate sufficient resources to engage appropriately and service the AIP requirements for the project.’

Longer than three soccer fields, at 336m, and designed for 40 years of operations without dry dock, the ‘Venturer’ is a modern engineering masterpiece. 

It is now moored 3.5 kilometres away from its sister offshore facility, Ichthys Explorer, and together they represent some of the largest and most advanced offshore facilities in the world.

The Ichthys project is a world-class LNG project to develop the gas and condensate field discovered in the Browse Basin. The Ichthys Field contains resource estimates of more than 12 trillion cubic feet of gas and approximately 500 million barrels of condensate. 

The gas will be transported from the offshore central processing facility through a subsea pipeline stretching more than 890 kilometres to the onshore LNG processing plant located at Bladin Point on Middle Arm Peninsula, Darwin, Northern Territory.

The floating production storage and offloading facility (FPSO) has been designed to process and store most of the condensate delivered from the Ichthys LNG Project’s central processing facility, Ichthys Explorer, before periodically offloading it to carriers for export to market.

‘The safe and efficient mooring of the Ichthys Venturer in the 250-metre deep waters of the Ichthys Field heralds another successful milestone for the INPEX-operated Ichthys LNG Project,’ Managing Director Ichthys Project Louis Bon said.

‘Completing the complex operation of connecting 21 pre-installed mooring chains, weighing more than 15,000 tonnes, from the seabed to the FPSO is testament to the well-coordinated work of our personnel, including contractors and subcontractors from around the globe.’

Derek Lark agrees, and believes this consortium driven major project has raised the bar for industry participation in Australia, and is proud ICN played a prominent role in its delivery. 

 

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