'Shell loses battle for lng Australia'

- Royal Dutch Shell, according to energy experts, is threatening to lose the exploitation of the large gas supply for the Australian coast from the Japanese Inpex.

Shell discovered the gas in 2007 and acquired the exploitation rights on the Browse Basin with a size of 85 billion cubic meters. It has built the world's largest floating gas export factory for the Prelude FLNG project, 475 kilometers north of Broome.

The Japanese want to start this month in an adjoining field, and probably award Shell, reports Bloomberg news agency on the basis of consultants.

Inpex focuses on a large reservoir, 200 kilometers off the northwestern coast. It would lead to a competitive advantage on Shell with its lead in drilling, according to energy consultant Wood Mackenzie.

That would be a few percent difference, but according to the consultant, the large stock is a substantial difference in favor of Inpex. Incidentally, this took a 17.5% stake in Prelude from Shell in 2012.

The group anticipates a sharp increase in demand for LNG from 2020, mainly due to a lack of investment since 2014 and the demand from China, India and South Korea for the abandonment of coal-fired plants. Shell also lobbies shale activities from BHP Billiton.

Shell's platform is above the Prelude gas field. Shell uses proprietary LNG technology on its Prelude FLNG platform to liquefy the fuel at sea before fuel is loaded onto tankers and sent to buyers.

Recovered LNG is cooled to-160 degrees Celsius. With its platform, Shell makes the high costs of installing submarine pipelines superfluous.

The two projects to start this year together would cost $ 50 billion in investment. This is the most prestigious project for Inpex: with 8.9 million tons of gas per year, it almost twice the size of Shell's Prelude, which will process 3.6 million tons per year.

According to Shell, it is all about stocks during a speech at the end of last year. Shell expects that it will supply gas for decades and that the market will be short of a surplus due to the large demand. Shell assumes a 2% increase in demand per year until 2035.

Shell reported that $ 200 billion of investments are needed to get enough LNG from customers to meet the peak in expected demand by 2030.