Total PNG says it is spending a lot of time working on the process of separating impurities from clean raw natural gas for the Papua LNG Project.
Speaking at the Petroleum ad Energy Summit in Port Moresby recently, Total PNG CEO, Philippe Blanchard, said this was one of the major challenges they currently faced.
Blanchard said he was depending on the joint venture partnerships of the Papua LNG Project to address the issue.
“People are willing to compare Papua LNG to the previous project, which is a very good one, but every project has its own challenges and Papua LNG we’ll have to manage the problem of impurity to gas. And I can tell you its not an easy one, and we are spending a huge amount of time within the team to try to resolve this issue and do the best we can while removing the impurities.
“The difficulty is not to remove it, the trick is what do you do with it once you have removed it.
“Which means that globally given what you’ve heard all this morning, the market, the buyers, the sellers, will have to be smart. And I’m counting a lot on our partnership to be very smart,” said Blanchard.
Raw natural gas is purified to meet the quality standards of specified companies which vary from pipeline to pipeline and are usually a function of a pipeline system's design and the markets that it serves.
Meanwhile, Total PNG announced that it has renewed its license for the next five years which Blanchard said gives them the confidante to go ahead with the Papua LNG Project.
“I just want to thank the authorities, we’ve renewed our license of the next five years, and that will give us as developers, as investors, the certainty that we need to go head. And with those five years associated with minimal work obligation as per our PL (Petroleum License), we are able to work and do what we have to do to deliver that project effectively and on time,” he said.