By Yuka Obayashi
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s biggest oil and gas explorer, Inpex Corp, said on Thursday it aims to make a final investment decision (FID) on its Abadi liquefied natural gas project in Indonesia in 2027 as part of its efforts to expand LNG supply.
Under a new three-year business plan through 2027, the company plans to invest 1.8 trillion yen ($11.7 billion) in growth areas, including its flagship Ichthys LNG project in Australia.
“Natural gas and LNG have a relatively low greenhouse gas emissions intensity compared to other fossil fuels and will play an increasingly important role as practical fuels in the energy transition,” President Takayuki Ueda told a news conference.
Inpex, which owns a 65% stake in the Abadi project, plans to begin front-end engineering design this year and reach FID in 2027, aiming to start production in the early 2030s.
The project has faced years of delays after planning changes and then the withdrawal by Shell which sold its 35% interest to Indonesia’s Pertamina and Malaysia’s Petronas in 2023.
Inpex plans to expand LNG production at Ichthys by adding a third train, targeting production in the first half of the 2030s.
Through new investments, its LNG output is expected to reach 800,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the 2030s, up from 630,000 currently, Ueda said.
Inpex will also explore cleaner, integrated gas-fired power generation, aiming to provide solutions to power-intensive sectors such as data centres, it said, without further details.
It is also aiming to support the expansion of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) by providing iodine, a key raw material, as a by-product from a gas field in Japan, and will pursue other resource recovery businesses from brine and subsurface fluids.
PSCs, thin and bendable, are a potential low-cost and space-saving alternative to silicon cells.
($1 = 153.8000 yen)
(Reporting by Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
