East Timor Pushes Back Greater Sunrise Gas Production to 2034

East Timor has pushed back the earliest possible start of production at the Greater Sunrise natural gas project by two years to 2034, the country's petroleum minister said, extending a timeline that has already been dogged by decades of delay.

Speaking at the Gastech conference in Bangkok, Francisco da Costa Monteiro, East Timor's Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, said gas is now likely to flow from the multi-billion dollar field in 2034 or 2035.

The project, developed with Australian partner Woodside, had previously been forecast by both sides to produce gas between 2032 and 2035 — the first timeline jointly announced for the field. Disagreements with Australia have held up development for years.

For Southeast Asia's poorest nation, also known as Timor-Leste, extracting the gas and exporting it as LNG is seen as central to demonstrating that its bets on gas in the Timor Sea are commercially viable and to drawing investors to other reserves.

"Timor-Leste is one of the potential countries that can play quite a role in this region and a role at large," Monteiro said. He added that the country has several discovered gas resources in the pipeline, and that bringing them to the international market is the current challenge. Sunda Gas hopes to commercialise the Chuditch gas discovery soon, he said.

The most recent round of negotiations over Greater Sunrise concluded last week, Monteiro said, and Timor-Leste aims to reach a final investment decision by 2029.