US energy major Chevron Corp said it has made a significant gas discovery at its Iago field off western Australia, which could help expand its nearby Wheatstone liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, Reuters reported.
Gas discoveries at the Iago-2 well, a previously untested reservoir, showed a flow rate of 53 million cubic feet a day, Chevron said in a statement.
Chevron said the Iago-2 well had strong future development prospects given its relatively shallow water location and close proximity to the Wheatstone field.
Chevron said in March it plans to develop a 5 million-tonnes-a-year LNG export facility to be supplied from Wheatstone, which has about 4.5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas.
"We continue to progress a multi-train Wheatstone LNG and domestic gas development with a view to entering the front-end engineering and design phase next year for a green field mainland gas facility," Roy Krzywosinski, managing director of Chevron Australia, said in a statement.
Chevron is also operator of the Gorgon LNG venture in west Australia, in which Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil each have a 25 per cent stake.
The 15 million-tonnes-per-year Gorgon project has suffered repeated delays to an original 2006 approval date due to a lengthy environmental approval process and costs.