The pandemic has finally hit Australia’s lucrative offshore gas industry with workers on Santos’ Bayu Undan gas platform in isolation after returning positive rapid antigen tests.
The platform 500 kilometres north of Darwin is in Timor Leste waters but its gas supplies the Darwin LNG plant.
The Bayu-Undan gas field, Timor Sea.Credit:
A Santos spokeswoman said on Friday afternoon that a small number of workers returned positive rapid antigen tests in the past 24 hours and were currently asymptomatic.
“As has been the case across all our assets, our COVID-19 health and safety protocols have been implemented to protect everyone on the facility,” she said.
“While waiting for PCR results to confirm their status, the workers are isolating and there are no additional close contacts.”
Loading
Commonwealth deputy chief medical officer Sonya Bennett said on Thursday there was only a two per cent chance that a RAT could incorrectly return a positive result.
In the early months of the pandemic in 2020, offshore gas producers went to extraordinary lengths to prevent an outbreak on their facilities, where the virus could rapidly spread in confined living quarters.
Operators reduced crew numbers to allow one worker per cabin, introduced lengthy quarantine before going offshore and extended the length of offshore swings to reduce the proportion of time workers spent in quarantine.
The Santos spokeswoman said production from the Bayu Undan facility had not been affected by the outbreak.
The Darwin LNG plant produced 3.2 million tones of LNG in 2021, almost all of which was sold on the spot market that produced extremely high prices for much of the year.
