Oil and gas giant Chevron Corporation has revealed the cost of its massive Gorgon liquefied natural gas project on Western Australia’s Barrow Island has increased to $54 billion. The cost blowout comes a year after the cost estimate for Gorgon, the world’s largest LNG development, was raised from $37 billion to $52 billion. Chevron said the project, under construction for four years, is nearly 75 percent complete. The company said Gorgon’s plant start-up and first gas is planned for mid-2015, a year later than initially planned. In a release Wednesday announcing the company’s 2014 overall capital and exploration budget, Chevron Vice Chairman George Kirkland said lessons learned from Gorgon’s complex construction were being applied to the $29 billion Wheatstone LNG project, also in Western Australia, which he said remains on schedule and on budget and is nearly 25 percent complete. The economics of […]