“The proposed pipeline is a key piece of infrastructure in our plans to bring to market our gas reserves in the Bowen Basin,” Arrow CEO Andrew Faulkner said.

The approval for this buried pipeline, which was approved by the Queensland government in March last year, follows Arrow’s decision last month to start the front-end engineering and design phase for its Bowen CSG project.

This project, about 150km southwest of Mackay, is based on developing tenements near Arrow’s existing gas fields with a staged expansion of about 4000 gas wells in a 8000 square kilometre area over 40 years.

The Clough-AMEC started the $70 million, year-long FEED contract this week.

While it is also targeting domestic markets, the Bowen project is one of the CSG projects linked to Arrow’s stalled $20 billion LNG project on Queensland’s Curtis Island with reports of mass lay-offs at Arrow emerging earlier this year.

There are some industry views that Arrow’s 50:50 owners Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina are waiting for a lower-cost environment to emerge once the other LNG projects are built on the island.

In separate news today, Faulkner said development options for Arrow’s Surat Basin gas reserves were being progressed.

He said “collaboration discussions with third parties” were continuing to identify the best option for commercialising Arrow’s gas reserves in both the Surat and Bowen basins.