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It's make or break for LNG as global pressures mount on Woodside and Shell (FROM THE AUSTRALIAN)

Since then, Shell and Ms Pickard have done little to dampen growing speculation that the company would use its increased stake to push for Browse to become the next testing ground for the company's revolutionary floating LNG technology. FLNG involves building the infrastructure normally associated with an onshore LNG facility on an enormous floating structure that is positioned directly above remote offshore gas fields.
The technology had previously been earmarked for smaller stranded fields that wouldn't support a stand-alone traditional land-based LNG plant, and Shell is currently developing its first FLNG project at the Prelude field off northern WA.
That project is being carried out on the watch of Ms Pickard, who most recently has spoken of Shell's desire to apply its FLNG technology to bigger fields in deeper water than Prelude -- a description that fits Browse.
The apparent push for FLNG at Browse means Ms Pickard, who counts Mr Voelte as a close friend, could potentially have a real role to play in torpedoing a project that Mr Voelte had worked so hard to create.
Shell's increasingly apparent desires to develop Browse through FLNG technology has angered WA Premier Colin Barnett, who says the state would lose out on jobs and investment if FLNG replaced viable land-based LNG developments.
Shell's comments would have also raised the eyebrows of Mr Coleman, given the various joint venture partners in Browse had committed to fully exploring the James Price Point option when negotiating retention leases over the Browse fields with the federal government.
For all the decades of debate and discussion that has surrounded Browse since its original discovery back in 1971, the fate of the project will be heavily influenced by factors over which the likes of Mr Coleman and Ms Pickard have no real control.
Australia is already among the most expensive places on earth to build an LNG plant, as the numerous projects already under way here compete for skilled labour.
The acuteness of those pressures was reflected last month when Chevron announced the budget for its Gorgon LNG project in WA had blown out by $US15bn to $US52bn. Browse, which is of a similar scale to Gorgon, could be exposed to similar cost stresses.
Accentuating the pressures for Woodside, Shell and the other partners will be the stubbornly high Australian dollar, which continues to affect the economics of the project in the eyes of an industry that tends to work in US dollars.
Then there is an increasingly difficult to read global gas market.
Asian demand for LNG has inspired the current wave of developments in Australia and remains strong. But the economic downturn in Europe has seen Qatar divert cargoes from Europe to Asia.
At the same time, the stunning rise of shale gas and coal-seam gas in North America has seen the US suddenly swamped with abundant domestic energy, to the point where there are numerous proposals to export gas from the US and Canada into Asia.
Those Qatari and North American cargoes shape as a direct threat to Australian LNG production. On top of that, a number of major gas discoveries off eastern Africa have opened the possibility of significant LNG exports coming out of that part of the world. (From The Australian)