Santos Starts Recruiting 600 Workers for Gladstone LNG Project

By Angela Macdonald-Smith

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Santos Ltd., Australia’s third- biggest oil and gas producer, started recruiting as many as 600 workers for its proposed A$7.7 billion ($5.5 billion) liquefied natural gas project in Queensland state.

The workers, which will be employees of Santos or of the Gladstone LNG, or GLNG, venture with Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., will be hired over the next two years, Matthew Doman, a spokesman for Adelaide-based Santos, said today by telephone. By the end of 2010 there will be about 900 Santos and GLNG employees in Queensland, Santos said in a statement.

Santos and Petronas last month awarded a $40 million contract to Bechtel Group Inc. to carry out initial engineering and design work on the Gladstone LNG project, to be built on Curtis Island. A final investment decision should be taken in the first half of 2010, with shipments due to start in 2014, Santos said.

Santos yesterday signed a multi-million dollar long-term lease for a 36-storey commercial tower in Brisbane, the company said in the statement, distributed yesterday to local media. The tower, to be called Santos Place, is under construction in the central business district. Santos’s eight-year lease, with two options each of five years, starts in mid-2009.

The GLNG project, owned 60 percent by the Australian company and 40 percent by Petronas, is one of four LNG projects proposed to be built in the Gladstone area using gas extracted from coal seams, which hasn’t previously been used as a fuel for export projects. BG Group Plc, and a venture between Origin Energy Ltd. and ConocoPhillips, are also planning to use ConocoPhillips’s LNG technology in their rival plants.

“Consolidation is a topic that interests us and it is not lost on us that BG, Conoco-Origin and the Santos-Petronas projects have all chosen to use the Conoco Cascade liquefaction process,” Citigroup Inc. said in a Dec. 22 report. “As all the players involved are likely to be economically rational, especially when the going gets tough, some form of consolidation on Curtis island, in particular, is expected.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Macdonald-Smith in Sydney at amacdonaldsm@bloomberg.net