Sorta nice that bidders/nations for Gulf LNG also have the heavy construction facilities and need to keep their specilized workers busy at home. They just may end up hired to provide the modules and material that Gulf LNG may need, which Thai/JP and SK sure look like they will have ownership stakes in. Kinda insestual, in a smart shrewd sense. Allowing these nations most economical LNG for decades.

No wonder 0% financing was offered to IOC to develop LNG facilities by JP a few years back.

JP/Thais have been working quite well together lately as Asian neighbors are investing in each

other to counter CH influence. Guess it's good to have big pic visibility.

Wonder what else, beside the GCIs at Petromin, the Thais/JP and O'Neill talked about last

weekend and prior week?

The Kardashians? How low could an un-accretive bid be and still get the stake?? How

worried they are about IOC resource estimates and not having an EWT???

Maybe Dry Hole Blow Back????

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Thai players start to spread their wings

Thailand’s fabrication yards, such as CUEL, Thai Nippon Steel (TNS) and Aibel, have historically landed the lion’s share of their offshore work for domestic projects.

They have benefitted from the many developments by national upstream company PTTEP, Chevron and, more recently, Mubadala Petroleum (Pearl Energy).

While there is expected to still be a strong demand for wellhead platforms for the continuing exploitation of Thailand’s complex offshore reservoirs, the country’s fabrication yards of late have been spreading their wings wider.

CUEL and STP&I are two of the four Thai yards building modules for Chevron’s massive Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Australia and, as such, could be well-placed to secure work on Inpex’s Ichthys LNG project, also in Australia.

Japanese operator Inpex earlier this month came into the market for the construction and installation of the two onshore liquefaction trains for Ichthys.

It is understood that the project will require 220 modules weighing about 180,000 tonnes in total.

Also, the accommodation modules for the Gorgon construction village were built in Thailand before being being shipped to Fremantle, where customs and Australian Quarantine & Inspection Service clearance is obtained.

The modules will then be transported to Barrow Island by barge.

Australian contractor Clough’s Sattahip fabrication yard in Thailand combines the company’s extensive project expertise with Asian industry aiming to deliver high quality, low cost fabrication services.

The contractor built and assembled the topsides and piperack modules for the PNG LNG condensate offloading jetty, which will be constructed adjacent to ExxonMobil’s planned LNG facility in Papua New Guinea.

Aibel, the Norwegian contractor with facilities also in Thailand, last year successfully completed the topsides modules for Statoil’s Gudrun project off Norway, but lost out to Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and Technip for the operator’s Dagny topsides.

TNS and Aibel (Thailand) are believed to be two of the trio of bidders for the engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning contract for Mubadala’s Nong Yao oilfield development in Block G11/48 in the Gulf of Thailand.

The facilities for Nong Yao include a 24-slot wellhead platform and a smaller 16-slot platform plus a floating storage and offloading vessel.

Meanwhile, CUEL and TNS are in the six-horse race to build a new wellhead platform for Carigali Hess Operating Company’s producing Bulan field on Block A-18 in the Malaysia-Thailand Joint Development Area.

TNS is understood to have landed the contract to install the Bulan B platform built by Cuel.

Over the next few years, PTTEP is expected to be in the market for upwards of 25 wellhead platforms as the national outfit looks to exploit new areas in its producing Bongkot and Arthit fields.