The Australian LNG export industry is dominated by large-scale processing plants and continuous production from a variety of natural gas reservoirs located both on- and off-shore. Their business model is based on the amount and reliability of LNG production over decadal time frames.
The technical challenges affecting this export industry’s competitiveness may be classed as follows:
- Amount of LNG that can be made per day (throughput limitations).
- Energy required to make, store and transport the LNG (efficiency limitations).
- Unplanned shutdowns interfering with contractual supply requirements (reliability limitations).
- Compositional changes in the natural gas source feeding the plant (gas quality limitations).
- Inability to extract & monetise high-value components in the gas (value-add limitations).
CRC Commonwealth Milestones for Program 1
Many of these indicative projects will ideally be conducted using novel, industrial scale research infrastructure established through the Kwinana Energy Transformation Hub (KETH), which will be a foundation project of the Future Energy Exports CRC. Details about the KETH, which is currently in Front End Engineering Design (FEED), can be found here.
Projects
21.RP1.0096 Kwinana Energy Transformation Hub
22.RP1.0115 Avoiding sulphur compound freeze-out in liquefied natural gas production