Australia’s Woodside prepares to safely restart Pluto LNG after unplanned outage

Australia's Woodside Energy has commenced preparations to safely restart the Pluto LNG facility on Nov. 26 after an unplanned outage on Nov. 25, a company spokesperson said Nov. 27.

"On Monday [Nov. 25], Woodside safely shut down the Pluto LNG facility due to a fault in the Pluto control system," the spokesperson said, noting that the unplanned event is under investigation.

"To maintain safety at the site, manual depressurization of the train was completed, and the offshore facility was shut in," the spokesperson said, adding that all personnel on the site were safe.

Meanwhile, operations at Karratha Gas Plant continue as normal, the spokesperson added. The Karratha Gas Plant is connected to Pluto by a pipeline.

The Australian Energy Market Operator's Gas Bulletin Board for Western Australia showed Nov. 27 that the domestic gas unplanned outage at Pluto was to run from Nov. 26 to Dec. 1.

The 4.9 million mt/year Pluto LNG facility is located in Western Australia's Pilbara region and processes gas from the offshore Pluto and Xena gas fields. The facility comprises an offshore platform and one onshore processing train. Gas is piped through a 180 km trunkline to a single onshore LNG-processing train.

Woodside is also constructing a second train at Pluto to process gas from the Scarborough gas project, with a production capacity of around 5 million mt/year of LNG.

Australia is among the world's largest LNG exporters and any supply disruption can create a potential tightness in the market.

Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed the JKM, the benchmark price for LNG cargoes delivered to Northeast Asia, for January at $15.302/MMBtu on Nov. 26, down 0.2% day on day.