page_title: Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline / History
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline at Main Line Valve station #7, near Dampier, Western Australia. The 660mm diameter pipeline is the large yellow pipe in the foreground.
context_page_description: The Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline is the longest natural gas pipeline in Australia. It is 660mm in diameter, which also makes it one of Australia's largest in terms of transmission capacity. At the time of its commissioning in 1984, it was one of the longest gas pipelines in the world.
  The pipeline runs within Western Australia from a point near Withnell Bay, on the Burrup Peninsula near Dampier, to Bunbury in the south-west of the state. It carries natural gas, most of which enters the pipeline at the domestic gas plant associated with the North West Shelf Venture project. The other main inlet point is approximately 135 km south of Dampier, where one of the sales gas pipelines from Varanus Island Processing Hub connects with the DBNGP. In June 2008, following a pipeline rupture and explosion at the Varanus Island facility, the DBNGP carried additional volumes of gas from the North West Shelf plant to the south-west of the state, for a period of several months. See: 2008 Western Australian gas crisis
  As a single trunkline it is 1530 km long, extending from the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region, to Bunbury in the south west of Western Australia.
context_section_description: The idea of a pipeline to transport gas from the North West Shelf to the south-west of Western Australia had its origins in 1975, following the discovery of large offshore reserves by WAPET and Woodside Petroleum.  Around this time, the State Energy Commission of WA reviewed the state's future gas requirements in conjunction with the partners in the North West Shelf consortium.  The developers of the North West Shelf were in the preliminary stages of planning a system of production facilities based on the Rankin and Goodwyn fields (located about 130 km off the coast of Dampier), linked to an LNG processing plant and a domestic gas plant situated at Withnell Bay.  As the state government had access to more attractive interest rates than the commercial venturers, the state agreed to fund and build (through SECWA) a 1540 km gas pipeline to transport the output from the domestic gas plant.  In addition, SECWA entered into long term (20-year) 'take-or-pay' contracts with the North West Shelf partners, in which SECWA agreed to pay for fixed volumes of gas which exceeded the market demand for gas in the south west.
  Engineering design commenced in 1979. and the pipeline was constructed between 1983 and 1984, with the extension south to Bunbury commissioned in 1985. Construction involved the welding of 127,000 sections of 12-metre pipe. Gas first flowed into the pipe on 16 August 1984. Following the disaggregation of SECWA in 1995, the pipeline came under the ownership and control of the government's gas utility, AlintaGas. As part of a government policy of privatisation, Alinta sold the pipeline in 1998 to Epic Energy, a consortium of two U.S. pipeline companies (along with three Australian institutional shareholders) at a price of A$2.407 billion.
  Epic Energy owned and operated the pipeline for six years, eventually selling the pipeline in October 2004 to Dampier Bunbury Pipeline (DBP) Ltd, which is the trading name of the DBNGP group of companies. DBP had two institutional shareholders: D.U.E.T. (Diversified Utilities and Energy Trusts)(80%) and Alcoa (20%) up until 2017.
  The DBNGP is currently owned and operated by Dampier Bunbury Pipeline (DBP), part of the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG), Australian Gas Infrastructure Group is owned by various consortia of Hong Kong-based entities listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The consortia include CK Asset Holdings Ltd (CKA), CK Infrastructure Holdings Ltd (CKI), Power Assets Holdings Ltd (PAH) and CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd (CKH).
caption: View of the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline at Main Line Valve No. 7 near Dampier.
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