Ichthys is the Greek word for fish. The name was chosen for a natural gas field discovered in the Timor Sea in 2000, 220 kilometres offshore from Western Australia in 250 metres of water. Whether the name was meant to acknowledge the marine environment being industrialised beneath it, or was simply a convenient label for a geological formation, is unclear. What followed the discovery was not subtle: one of the largest engineering projects ever undertaken in Australia, with an initial cost estimate of US$34 billion that grew to US$37 billion before the first gas flowed.
The heart of the Ichthys operation is the Central Processing Facility, a semi-submersible platform named the Ichthys Explorer. It is the world's largest semi-submersible platform, weighing approximately 120,000 tonnes. Its topsides measure approximately 130 metres across. The facility was designed to operate continuously for 40 years and is built to withstand a 1-in-10,000-year storm event — a standard that required anchor chains with individual links up to one metre in length.
Alongside it floats the Ichthys Venturer, a Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading vessel 336 metres long with a capacity to hold 1.12 million barrels of crude oil. Unlike most FPSOs, which are designed to disconnect and sail away when a cyclone approaches, the Ichthys Venturer is permanently moored. This is because continuous LNG production requires constant removal of liquids from the gas trunkline — a shutdown for a cyclone would disrupt the whole system. The strongest cyclone recorded in the region, Cyclone Orson, reached wind speeds of 250 kilometres per hour. The Venturer is built to ride that out.
The gas extracted at the Ichthys field travels 889 kilometres through a subsea pipeline to a liquefaction plant at Bladin Point, near Darwin. This is the longest subsea pipeline in the Southern Hemisphere. At Bladin Point, two processing trains convert the gas into liquefied natural gas at a nominal capacity of 8.9 million tonnes per annum. The LNG is then loaded onto tankers for export, primarily to Japan.
The project was developed by Inpex, a Japanese energy company, in partnership with TotalEnergies and a consortium of Japanese utilities including Tokyo Gas, Osaka Gas, Chubu Electric Power, Toho Gas, and Kansai Electric Power, as well as CPC Corporation from Taiwan. It is the largest overseas project ever undertaken by a Japanese company. First gas from the offshore field was achieved on 30 July 2018. The first LNG cargo was loaded on 22 October 2018.
The Ichthys project is more expensive per tonne of LNG production than the Chevron-sponsored Gorgon project — the other giant LNG development off northwestern Australia — despite Gorgon's higher total cost. The difference is geography: Ichthys is far from shore, in deep water, connected to the mainland by nearly 900 kilometres of pipeline. Infrastructure of this scale was constructed by a joint venture between JGC Corporation, KBR, and Chiyoda Corporation, with contributions from Samsung Heavy Industries, General Electric, McDermott, and dozens of other contractors.
Total proven reserves of the Ichthys gas field are around 366 billion cubic metres. Production was planned at around 10 million cubic metres per day. The project represents a significant portion of Australia's LNG export capacity and a meaningful piece of Japan's energy security strategy — an energy relationship between two countries separated by 5,000 kilometres of ocean, mediated by a 250-metre-deep hole in the Timor Sea floor.
The Ichthys field is located at approximately 13.60°S, 123.30°E in the Timor Sea, 220 km northwest of the Western Australia coast. The two main floating platforms — the Ichthys Explorer and Ichthys Venturer — are visible from low-level aircraft as large industrial structures surrounded by flare stacks. At night, the flares are visible from considerable distance. Darwin (YPDN) is the nearest major airport, approximately 820 km to the northeast. Flying in this area requires compliance with maritime zone regulations; the facilities are surrounded by safety exclusion zones.