A powerful tropical cyclone in Western Australia has disrupted production at the country’s two biggest liquefied natural gas plants run by Chevron and Woodside, exacerbating a global supply crunch caused by the conflict in the Middle East.
Australia became the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after Qatar shut down production this month following damage to its facilities from Iranian strikes. Global LNG flows out of the Middle East have also been upended by Iran’s blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
Chevron said it was working to restore production at its Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG facilities in Western Australia following outages that were likely due to Tropical Cyclone Narelle, a Category 3 storm, which made landfall on Friday.
Gorgon is Australia’s largest LNG export facility, producing 15.6 million metric tons a year with three processing trains, while the smaller Wheatstone consists of two trains producing 8.9 million tons.
Woodside also said production at its Karratha gas plant had been disrupted by the cyclone. The gas plant is the onshore processing facility for the North West Shelf, Australia's oldest and second-largest LNG project, producing 14.3 million metric tons a year, down from 16.9 million tons a year after it shut down one of its five production trains.
MST Marquee analyst Saul Kavonic estimated the cyclone was disrupting more than 30 million tonnes a year of Australian LNG supply. Combined with the shock from the Middle East, he said that more than a quarter of global LNG supply was currently affected.
"This will exacerbate gas market tightness in Asia and Europe, especially if it takes more than a matter of days to normalise Australian production levels again," Kavonic said.
A Chevron Australia spokesperson said an outage occurred at the Wheatstone platform, about 225 km (140 miles) off Australia's west coast, about midday on Thursday local time (0400 GMT), causing a suspension of onshore gas production.
"All personnel were demobilised from the Wheatstone Platform ahead of the cyclone passing, which has been operated remotely from our Perth office since Tuesday afternoon," the spokesperson said.
Three hours later, an outage shut down one of three LNG production trains at the Gorgon facility on Barrow Island, about 50 km offshore.
"We will resume full production at both facilities once it is safe to do so," a Chevron Australia spokesperson said.
Woodside said production at the North West Shelf project would restart once it is able to send workers back to its offshore facilities. It added that operations were continuing at its Macedon domestic gas plant and its Pluto LNG facility.
"If there is any material impact to production or assets, Woodside will update the market," a spokesperson said.
The company in January lowered its production guidance for 2026 to 172 million to 186 million barrels of oil equivalent thanks to downtime at Pluto LNG after a record 198.8 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2025.
A spokesperson for Japanese oil company Inpex said there had been no damage or outages at its Ichthys LNG project off Western Australia.
Industrial chemical producer Perdaman said construction on its A$6 billion ($4.14 billion) gas-fuelled fertiliser plant in the Pilbara region had been shut down for two days due to the cyclone, but the project was still on target to be completed by June next year.
Darren Klemm, commissioner of Western Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services, said authorities were still waiting to assess the damage from the cyclone but that it would likely be significant.
Separately on Tuesday, Santos STO.AX confirmed its 3.7 million ton Darwin LNG project was offline temporarily. The company said the shutdown was related to maintenance work.
($1 = 1.4510 Australian dollars)
(Reuters - Reporting by Renju Jose, Byron Kaye, Christine Chen and Alasdair Pal in Sydney, Helen Clark in Perth and Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Himani Sarkar, Chris Reese and Thomas Derpinghaus)
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