Australian Mining 6 November, 2012 Vicky Validakis
AG&P have been awarded the $152 million modularisation contract to support the Ichthys LNG project in the Northern Territory.
The contract to modularise 28 local electrical rooms (LER) and local instrumentation rooms (LIR) will provide the electrical backbone for the Ichthys Project.
The Ichthys Project is the second-largest private investment in Australia’s history. At the peak of construction, a workforce of approximately 3,000 will be needed to build the onshore facilities, which include an LNG plant, a condensate plant, product loading jetties and a 300-megawatt power station.
The LER/LIR fabrication and assembly is to be one hundred per cent constructed and integrated in Batangas, Philippines, with production expected to begin in the first quarter of 2013, the product will then be shipped back to NT in three years.
Chairman of AG&P, Joseph Sigelman said the company was ‘thrilled that it can support this vital project which will provide critical LNG to Japan and other countries.”
As part of the project, Sigelman told Australian Mining that all 17,000 tonnes of steel used will be sourced from BlueScope Steel.
Sigelman highlighted the readiness of the industry to develop ‘more comprehensive and complete modules’ that were ‘fully outfitted with complex electrical and instrumentation systems installed and tested prior to shipment.”
“Modularisation has been around as a concept, the issue is that now modularisation is fundamentally changing,” he told Australian Mining.
“In the past it was mostly steel and pipe, mainly frames.”
“Now we’re integrating electrical systems, mechanical systems, instrumentation, heating ventilation and air conditioning in addition to the steel and the pipes.”
“Now we’re actually getting into the heart of these things and the more work that gets put into the modules that get shipped, the more affective the modularisation system is.”
Sigelman said that often there was not the man-power or financial viability to undertake such large-scale projects on site, and that this directly affected the way a project was viewed by investors.
“If you can actually reduce the cost structure of these (large-scale projects) you wind up making these projects financially viable and it has a huge impact,” he added.