Santos looks set in as little as one month to shut down its Darwin liquefied natural gas project in Australia’s Northern Territory as feed gas levels from its ageing Bayu-Undan field offshore Timor-Leste fall below the level required for commercial operations.

The Australian operator is however in discussions with the NT government and some of the infrastructure owners there to potentially deliver gas to the territory and possibly to other domestic customers further away.

“We’re still producing at a reasonable rate, [but] it will get to the point when it drops below the rate that makes sense to run an LNG plant,” Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher told reporters on the sidelines of the 2023 APPEA conference in Adelaide.