By Helen Clark
PERTH (Reuters) -Australia’s Woodside Energy expects its sales of oil and gas to climb by 50% by 2032 to meet rising demand for energy, particularly in Asian markets, company CEO Meg O’Neill said on Wednesday.
Over the next seven years, sales should rise to 300 million barrels of oil equivalent per year, from 203.5 million boe a year in 2024, O’Neill said in a presentation during the company’s Capital Markets Day.
That is a 6% increase annually in sales, the presentation showed. It aims for $9 billion of free cash flow by 2032.
O’Neill said despite forecasts suggesting LNG export overcapacity for the rest of the decade Woodside had signed export contracts each year to 2030 and “we do think the market is very elastic and there is quite significant capacity for the market to absorb incremental supply coming online”.
“If those customers thought the market was going to be awash in LNG they would not be signing up for long term offtake agreements,” she said.
She pointed to Woodside’s Louisiana LNG site, which will add 16.5 million metric tons a year of export capacity by 2029, and the Scarborough gas field start up in 2026 as key projects, along with the Trion oil field in Mexico.
Woodside’s presentation forecast total Chinese natural gas demand by 2040 to be over 60 billion cubic feet per day.
“We would fully expect that as LNG remains attractive for them and when pricing is within the range that their buyers want to pay, that China will be able to absorb quite a bit of LNG into the market place,” O’Neill said.
In terms of expected economic returns, Louisiana LNG is considered Woodside’s best investment prospect, according to O’Neill. The first phase was approved earlier this year. A second phase will take export capacity to 27.5 million tons per year.
Over 90% of its production in the 2030s will be fossil fuels as Woodside has scaled back clean energy projects thanks to lack of commerciality and changes under the new U.S. administration, leaving only one clean ammonia project that will initially be emissions intensive.
(Reporting by Helen Clark; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
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