Australia tribunal rejects move by Japan's Inpex to stop LNG strike
- The strike at the 9.3-million-ton-per-year facility will now run until June 23 with a ban on the loading of all cargoes
PERTH: An Australian labour tribunal on Sunday rejected an application by Japanese gas company Inpex to halt a strike by some 400 oil and gas workers at its Ichthys LNG project.
The Fair Work Commission rejected Inpex’s claim that a shutdown would hurt the Australian economy due to lost export revenue and would risk dangerous blackouts.
The strike at the 9.3-million-ton-per-year facility will now run until June 23 with a ban on the loading of all cargoes.
The commission’s deputy president, Michael Easton, ruled that unions and the company must keep bargaining.
Inpex did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours. The company is expected to submit another offer to workers on Monday.
After a lengthy hearing that began on Saturday, Easton said he had found no evidence of an adverse economic effect from a strike or a danger to Australia’s Northern Territory but accepted Inpex’s view that there could be a halt to production that could last up to a week.
“I do not regard this to be a significant disruption. At least some of the previous production will not be lost as soon as the loading ban is lifted,” he said.
Power and Water Corp, a government-owned utility for the Northern Territory, has organised contingency measures to avoid blackouts, Easton said, while the Ichthys liquefied natural gas facility has sustained more comprehensive outages in the past with no adverse effect.
Strikes escalated on Thursday to periods of up to eight hours after Inpex and union groups failed to find a solution. Late on Friday, the strike periods were wound back to two blocks of two hours at the beginning and end of a shift.
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The strike will result in LNG and condensate storage onshore reaching capacity within a few days, forcing a production shutdown, Inpex’s superintendent for onshore, Damien Chandler, told the commission.
If production is halted for a week, four LNG cargoes would miss their loadings, an Inpex employee said, while two condensate cargoes had already missed loading.
Another Inpex employee said offshore production could slow and that this could create technical challenges that would also lead to a shutdown.
Ichthys is a joint venture between Inpex, France’s TotalEnergies and the Australian subsidiaries of CPC Corporation Taiwan, Osaka Gas, Kansai Electric Power, JERA and Toho Gas.
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