Chevron says it has resumed LNG production at one of its two trains at the Gorgon project after an outage of slightly more than a month.
“Gorgon LNG Train 1 operation resumed earlier this week,” a spokesman for the US oil major told Reuters.
“Production was halted in late November 2016 to assess and address some performance variations,” it added.
Output at the plant’s train 2 production line was unaffected during the period, the spokesman said. The Gorgon project had continued to produce and load cargoes, he said.
The massive $54bn Gorgon project has been plagued by a string of operational issues since it started up in March 2016.
Despite the continued production form the second train, the supply disruption led to an urgent demand for replacement cargoes to fulfil customer commitments, according to traders familiar with the matter according to Reuters.
LNG production at Gorgon, Australia's largest single resources project, got under way on 7 March after seven years of construction work.
The first cargo from the project was loaded on 20 March aboard Chevron's 160,000-cbm LNGC Asia Excellence (built 2015) bound for Japan.
Gorgon LNG, in which ExxonMobil and Shell are also foundation partners, is supplied from the Gorgon and Jansz-Io gas fields, located within the Greater Gorgon area, between 130 and 220 km off the northwest coast of Western Australia.
It includes a 15.6mtpa LNG plant on Barrow Island, a carbon dioxide injection project and a domestic gas plant with the capacity to supply 300 terajoules of gas per day to Western Australia.
Chevron has a 47.3% stake in the porject. ExxonMobil and Shell each own 25%, Japanese utilities Osaka Gas, Tokyo Gas and Chubu Electric Power own minor stakes.
