Investor Briefing Day 2020

Woodside has risen to the challenges of 2020, delivering exceptional operating performance and demonstrating prudent financial decision-making to protect value for shareholders, CEO Peter Coleman said at the company’s annual Investor Briefing Day.

“Despite the constraints imposed by the pandemic, throughout this year our teams have met the highest standards of safety, reliability and production, allowing us to narrow our full-year output guidance to 99 to 101 million barrels of oil equivalent.

“We’ve made excellent progress at Sangomar Field Development Phase 1 offshore Senegal and expect to complete our acquisition of Cairn’s interest in the joint venture before year-end. Sangomar is an attractive, de-risked asset and, as previously flagged, we are looking to sell down our equity to the right partner at the right price over the course of 2021.

“The deferral in March this year of final investment decisions on Scarborough and Pluto Train 2 allowed the project teams to seize the day, extracting additional value by potentially increasing the offshore capacity and optimising the development schedule.

“Scarborough is a globally competitive development which has the potential to be a game-changer for Woodside, producing net cash flow of around $35 billion over its field life.

“We estimate the targeted 20% increase in Scarborough’s upstream capacity can be achieved at a very modest capex, with virtually no cost impact on the downstream.

“In terms of both contractor availability and the external LNG market, we expect the timing to be right for final investment decisions on Scarborough and Pluto Train 2 in the second half of 2021. The Scarborough Joint Venture is aligned on this schedule, which would put us on track for first LNG in 2026.

“We also remain aligned with our joint venture partners on the development of Browse as backfill to the North West Shelf. Work is continuing to move Browse towards the front-end engineering design phase, with a final investment decision targeted from 2023.

“This year we are also setting new targets for direct carbon emission reductions in support of our goal to be net zero by 2050. We are now aiming for reductions of 15% by 2025 and 30% by 2030 in our net equity Scope 1 and 2 emissions compared with the 2016-2020 period.

“We plan to achieve these targets using a range of levers: designing out emissions in new and existing facilities, potentially including carbon capture and storage; limiting emissions through efficient operations; and using high-quality offsets.

“Woodside is a resilient hydrocarbon business and our investments in technology and offsets, along with our early-mover activities in hydrogen, build on our existing capabilities in LNG and position us to provide value through the energy transition.

“We continue to provide enhanced transparency into our business, and have recently published a review of the policy positions of industry associations we belong to for alignment with our climate change policy positions,” he said.