Maladina recycles the 2009 promise PNG LNG landowners are still waiting on

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

Petroleum Minister Jimmy Maladina wants Papua New Guineans to win more jobs, training and contracts from Papua LNG. So does every landowner in Gulf and Central. The difference is that Maladina holds the pen on the instruments that decide those outcomes, and after Thursday's benefit-sharing signing he offered a wish list instead of a plan.
A national content plan for this project has been promised since 2019. That August, after the NEC review of the O'Neill-era gas agreement, then Petroleum Minister Kerenga Kua announced that Total would prepare a detailed plan with the Department of Petroleum and Energy. In October 2022 the minister had still not signed it off. In 2023 TotalEnergies said it would hand one over that September. Seven years on, and weeks from a final investment decision, the minister who approves that plan is still describing what it ought to contain. If an approved plan exists, he should publish it, with hiring and procurement targets and penalties for missing them. If it does not, his statement is an admission.
Local firms should get work, Maladina said, "provided they meet the required commercial, technical, and safety standards." That condition is how the PNG LNG construction phase was carved up. Sir Moi Avei, then chairing Kumul Petroleum, told The National that landowners were handed labour hire, security and catering while the valuable contracts went to foreign companies. "What is the evidence for Boera people?" he asked. Boera sits beside Caution Bay, where Papua LNG's new trains will be built inside the existing plant.
TotalEnergies has cut close to US$4 billion from the budget since 2024, partly by rebidding construction packages to a wider panel of Asian contractors, bringing capital expenditure to about US$14 billion. Savings found that way are contracts that were never headed for Kikori or Boera. The workforce promise has shrunk with them. Peter O'Neill claimed in 2019 the project would employ about 20,000 people during construction; by 2023 TotalEnergies' head of national content was talking about 8,000. A minister serious about national content would explain how it survived that squeeze.
Maladina says that where capacity gaps exist, the country must invest in apprenticeships and technical education. A trade apprenticeship takes years. TotalEnergies has described construction as an intensive three to four years after FID. Gaps identified this month will be filled by workers flown in.
The K6.6 billion benefit-sharing figure is a projection over the life of a project that has not reached FID, exposed to gas prices nobody in Waigani controls. More troubling is what Kikori MP Soroi Eoe told Baimuru, Ihu and East Kikori at the signing: that those left out were not left out. In April, Kaimare chief Joseph Ka'au flew to Santos's annual meeting in Adelaide to tell shareholders his Baimuru community had been shut out of project discussions by a rule excluding anyone five kilometres from the company's operations. Prime Minister Marape said in July that benefit sharing had to be completed before FID. If three local-level government areas are still waiting to be written in, it is not complete. An MP's assurance is not a clause. Where will their share come from, and who signs for it?
The PNG LNG benefit-sharing agreement was approved in 2009. By late 2016 more than 200 cargoes had sailed and landowners had still not received royalties, because the royalty divisions agreed at the development forums were never gazetted and the courts froze clan vetting. Kua later told Parliament that between K900 million and K1 billion sat with the Bank of PNG and MRDC, tied up in landowner-identification litigation. Fabian Pok, his predecessor, blamed rushed social mapping. Marape says his government has drawn on that experience. Thursday suggests the lesson drawn was to sign first and settle who the beneficiaries are later.
Maladina does not need to call for anything. He can table the approved national content plan with enforceable local hiring and procurement targets. He can publish the Tier One agreement and its list of beneficiary areas. He can set out in writing, before FID, how Baimuru, Ihu and East Kikori are included and from whose share. Until he does, his statement is the speech PNG LNG landowners heard in 2009, delivered to a new audience.