XRG, the international energy investment arm of Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC, has agreed to buy Shell’s 16.67 percent interest in Australia’s North West Shelf LNG project for a base consideration of $1.45 billion, plus an undisclosed contingent payment tied to future milestones. The deal, announced by both companies on 3 November, is XRG’s first investment in Australian LNG and still needs regulatory approvals before an expected close in 2027.
The interest Shell is selling is more than a percentage in one venture. It carries stakes across the interconnected joint ventures behind the North West Shelf: upstream gas interests, pipeline and midstream infrastructure, related titles and project agreements, offtake arrangements and the NWS project companies themselves. XRG also assumes all of Shell’s decommissioning obligations for the ageing complex, and will provide security for them. The transaction has an effective date of 1 January 2026.
The North West Shelf, Australia’s first LNG project, can liquefy 14.3 million tonnes a year and holds 4.4 trillion cubic feet equivalent of remaining resources. Woodside operates it alongside Chevron, bp, Shell, CNOOC and MIMI, the Mitsubishi-Mitsui venture. Shell’s own share of that capacity is about 2.4 million tonnes a year, which puts the base price near $600 per ton of annual capacity, a calculation from published figures rather than a stated deal metric. For a buyer, the appeal is an operating complex with decades of infrastructure in place, sitting close to the fastest-growing LNG demand in Asia-Pacific.
Shell is selling a mature position. Its integrated gas president, Cederic Cremers, said the sale “realizes value from a mature, non-operated asset” as the North West Shelf moves toward a third-party toll-processing model, in which the plant increasingly processes other producers’ gas for a fee as its original fields decline. Shell, which keeps operating QGC and Prelude FLNG in Australia, says it will still grow LNG sales 4 to 5 percent a year through 2030.
For XRG, the purchase resumes an Australian push that stalled a year ago, when the company walked away from its takeover bid for gas producer Santos. XRG already holds equity in the five trains of the Rio Grande LNG project in Texas and is backing an LNG development in Argentina with YPF and Eni. ADNOC has folded its LNG marketing into a single platform targeting 47 million tonnes a year of marketable supply by 2035.
Gulf producers have been moving faster to secure LNG capacity outside the Strait of Hormuz since the region’s conflict began. A stake in an Australian project serves that purpose: the gas liquefies and ships to Asian customers without transiting the gulf at all.
The deal’s next verifiable checkpoints are the regulatory approvals and the 2027 closing. What follows close matters as much: whether the new owner can hold volumes steady as legacy fields decline, and how it prices tolling slots at Karratha as the project’s economics shift from producing gas to processing it.
