History
More than 200 exploration wells have been drilled in the Barrow sub-basin over the past 35 years, including West Tryal Rocks in 1972, and Spar in 1976 - both discovered by West Australian Petroleum (WAPET) which had been a pioneering company in the development of the Western Australian petroleum industry. WAPET was the operator on behalf of various joint ventures comprising Chevron, Texaco, Shell and Ampolex (the exploration division of Ampol). Chevron and Texaco merged in 2001, Mobil took over Ampolex, and later merged with Exxon to form ExxonMobil. In 2000, Chevron became the operator of all WAPET's petroleum assets.
WAPET discovered Gorgon in 1981 with the drilling of the Gorgon 1 well. Later discoveries included Chrysaor (1994) and Dionysus (1996). The Jansz-Io gas accumulation, discovered in January 2000, contains an estimated 566 billion cubic meters of recoverable reserves.
The project received preliminary environmental approvals from the West Australian government in September 2007 and from the Federal Minister for the Environment in the following month. The project developers then submitted revised plans to cover an expansion in the size of the project. Final environmental approval was received from the state government on 11 August 2009. On 26 August 2009, the Federal Environment Minister announced that the expanded project on Barrow Island had been given conditional environmental approval.
During the 2007 Australian federal election campaign, the Australian Labor Party announced that a future Labor government would set aside 25% of future Petroleum Resource Rent Tax from the Gorgon project to establish a Western Australian Infrastructure Fund.
Read more about this topic: Gorgon Gas Project
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