The Greater Sunrise natural gas project has pushed back its earliest possible production start by two years to 2034, East Timor's petroleum minister said, tightening a timeline already plagued by decades of delays.
Production at the multi-billion dollar gas field, which has been stalled for decades amid disagreements with Australia, will likely begin in 2034 or 2035, Francisco da Costa Monteiro, East Timor's Minister of Petroleum & Mineral Resources, said at the Gastech conference in Bangkok.
East Timor and its Australian partner Woodside ast year forecast the project would produce gas by 2032 to 35, the first time a timeline was announced by both parties.
Extraction and subsequent LNG exports from the gas field are crucial for Southeast Asia's poorest nation, also known as Timor-Leste, to prove that bets on LNG in the Timor Sea are viable and attract investors to develop other gas reserves.
"Timor-Leste is one of the potential countries that can play quite a role in this region and a role at large," Monteiro said.
"We do have several discovered gas resources in the pipeline and the whole idea of putting that in the international market is the challenge at the moment," he said, adding that Sunda GasSNDA.Lhopes to commercialise the Chuditch gas discovery soon.
The last round of negotiations over the Greater Sunrise gas field were finalised last week, and Timor-Leste hopes to have a final investment decision by 2029, Monteiro said.
(Reuters - Reporting by Helen Clark; Writing by Sudarshan Varadhan)
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