Australian independent Woodside Petroleum has signed a seven-year, 840,000 t/yr sales and purchase agreement (SPA) to sell LNG to the energy trading unit of German utility RWE.
The deal, which starts in 2025, will be supplied through Woodside's portfolio and is not tied to any specific LNG project.
The agreement is further evidence of strong market demand for LNG in the second half of this decade, Woodside's vice president of development and marketing Meg O'Neill said.
The deal with RWE comes as Woodside is planning to take a final investment decision (FID) on the 13 trillion ft³ (368bn m³) greater Scarborough fields in the Carnarvon basin offshore Western Australia.
The concept design for Scarborough is to provide up to 8mn t/yr at peak output, mainly as feedstock for the second production train planned at the 4.3mn t/yr Pluto LNG plant. The remainder will be split between backfill for Pluto's existing train and the 16.3mn t/yr North West Shelf (NWS) LNG venture, which is close to Pluto. The downstream liquefaction plants are proposed to be linked by a 3.3km pipeline to allow gas flows to switch between the two plants. Woodside operates both Pluto and NWS LNG.
"This agreement with RWE is another demonstration of the momentum we are gathering ahead of our targeted FID on Scarborough and Pluto Train 2 in the second half of this year," O'Neill said.
Woodside has signed long-term deals for half of the LNG volumes from the Scarborough gas field.
The RWE deal is the second that Woodside has signed with a German buyer this year. It agreed last month to double the amount of LNG it plans to supply German utility Uniper under a revised SPA first signed in December 2019. It may double this again, conditional on FID for the Scarborough gas project.
The latest Woodside-RWE deal builds on the agreements signed between the two firms signed in 2017 and 2018. The two companies signed a supply agreement in December 2018 for an unspecified amount of LNG between late 2020 and the end of 2022, extended the original agreement signed in November 2017 for 12 cargoes.
