History
The idea of a pipeline to transport gas from the North West Shelf to the south-west of Western Australia had its origins in 1975, following the discovery of large offshore reserves by WAPET and woodside Petroleum. Around this time, the State Energy Commission of WA reviewed the state's future gas requirements in conjunction with the partners in the North West Shelf consortium. The developers of the North West Shelf were in the preliminary stages of planning a system of production facilities based on the Rankin and Goodwyn fields (located about 130 km off the coast of Dampier), linked to an LNG processing plant and a domestic gas plant situated at Withnell Bay. As the state government had access to more attractive interest rates than the commercial venturers, the state agreed to fund and build (through SECWA) a 1540 km gas pipeline to transport the output from the domestic gas plant. In addition, SECWA entered into long term (20 year) 'take-or-pay' contracts with the North West Shelf partners, in which SECWA agreed to pay for fixed volumes of gas which exceeded the market demand for gas in the south west.
Engineering design commenced in 1979. and the pipeline was constructed between 1983 and 1984, with the extension south to Bunbury commissioned in 1985. Construction involved the welding of 127,000 sections of 12 metre pipe. Gas first flowed into the pipe on 16 August 1984. Following the disaggregation of SECWA in 1995, the pipeline came under the ownership and control of the government's gas utility, AlintaGas. As part of a government policy of privatisation, Alinta sold the pipeline in 1998 to Epic Energy, a consortium of two U.S. pipeline companies (along with three Australian institutional shareholders) at a price of A$2.407 billion.
Epic Energy owned and operated the pipeline for six years, eventually selling the pipeline in October 2004 to Dampier Bunbury Pipeline (DBP) Ltd, which is the trading name of the DBNGP group of companies. DBP has two institutional shareholders: D.U.E.T. (Diversified Utilities and Energy Trusts)(80%) and Alcoa (20%). An executive team is responsible to the owners for the performance of the business, including corporate, regulatory, commercial and strategic functions.
Read more about this topic: Dampier To Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline
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