| Client | Jemena |
| Location | Tennant Creek, NT to Mt Isa, Qld |
Linking the Northern Territory to the East Coast Gas Market
Jemena successfully bid to build, own and operate the NGP in a competitive process with the Northern Territory government in 2015 and commissioned the pipeline in late 2018, running to budget and ahead of schedule.
The NGP is an $800M, 622km pipeline from Tennant Creek to Mt Isa with compressor stations at each end of the pipeline and a cryogenic gas processing facility at Tennant Creek in order to process Northern Territory quality gas to meet the Australian standard required on the East Coast.
The Zinfra Gas Projects team, as Jemena’s major project execution group, managed the engineering, procurement and construction of the Northern Gas Pipeline and associated facilities.
What is special about the ngp?
The NGP was constructed through the remote centre of Australia and has the following characteristics. The NGP:
runs through 2 different states and therefore requires 2 pipeline licences
has 10 Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA)
2 Aboriginal Land Rights Act Agreements (ALRA)
3 major environmental approvals
extreme temperatures and wet season constraints
67% of jobs on the NGP have been filled by locals from Queensland and the NT
23% of total NGP jobs have been filled by indigenous people local to QUEENSLAND and the NT.
Social impact
Our Industry Participation Plan has been a key part of driving local content, a strong engagement with the community and creating the social licence. In addition to the significant local jobs outlined above, we established a number of programs to ensure this engagement and social licence was achieved including a Tennant Creek Indigenous Social Employment project, a project ready training program and a gas operator training program.
Native Title presents unique challenges in the Northern Territory with multiple types of title including Aboriginal Freehold Land (ALRA Land) for which compulsory acquisition is only able to be carried out by the Commonwealth Government who refuse to do so. In addition, the Northern and Central Lands Councils are the official representatives of the indigenous groups for executing ILUAs however you also have to obtain signatures from each group, many of whom are not aligned or necessarily happy to be represented by the councils.
The route crossed ALRA land and despite the challenges associated with negotiating 10 different ILUAs and 2 ALRA agreements has resulted in Jemena and Zinfra forging strong relationships with the traditional owner groups.
It was very important to us that they had an active involvement in the project through training and jobs and we built targeted programs to deliver on this aspiration.
What was the project’s contracting strategy?
Jemena/Zinfra took the overall project management role on the NGP engaging McConnell Dowell in an ECI process, running the major procurement and directly engaging the design contract, then retendering the construction contracts at the end of the ECI phase. By leveraging our in house capability we were able to achieve material savings in project cost through this approach, and also through the decision to split the construction contract, running two spreads with separate constructors during 2017. McConnell Dowel and Spiecapag were awarded the pipeline construction contracts and Civmec the compressor station and processing facilities.
