4000 FAKE OR REAL JOBS AND NOBODY TO PAY FOR THEM?

by PAUL L.KEBAIJA

At the Papua LNG development forum in Port Moresby this week, ExxonMobil PNG's national content manager Sam Koyama told delegates the downstream operation would need 4,000 to 4,500 workers. He set out three pillars, a training pipeline running to November 2031, and an estimated K1.2 billion to K1.4 billion in national content spend for PNG companies.

Then came the condition, tucked into the middle of his own presentation. The entire schedule, road works, site surveys, camps, marine construction, the plant itself, holds only "if final investment decision was in November".

There is no final investment decision. There has not been one since the project was first supposed to be sanctioned in early 2024, when the contractors came back at roughly US$18 billion and TotalEnergies balked. Since then the target has moved to late 2025, then early 2026, then mid-2026, and now the fourth quarter. Each slip has been announced with the same confidence as the last.

The harder problem is money. TotalEnergies lost Crédit Agricole as its lead financial advisor in 2024 and replaced it with Japan's MUFG. By February this year, 29 banks and export credit agencies had ruled the project out, including BNP Paribas, ING, KfW IPEX-Bank and Standard Bank. An advisor is not a lender. Somebody has to actually write the cheque, and after two years of looking, no syndicate has been announced. That is the number Papua New Guineans should be asking about , not 4,500.

The timing makes it worse. This jobs figure was delivered at a forum the host province is threatening to walk out of. Gulf's acting governor Morris Taudevin let a 14-day ultimatum expire on 11 August without a written response from either the Petroleum Minister or the National Petroleum Authority, over social mapping and landowner identification, welfare for stakeholders stranded in Port Moresby, and promised consultation funding that never arrived. The consensus emerging from Gulf's own stakeholders is to go home. Under the Oil and Gas Act, there is no FID without a completed development forum. So the State is watching its legal precondition wobble while its partners announce hiring targets.

And read the jobs claim carefully. The construction window runs May 2027 to April 2031. The training programme ends November 2031. Most of that headcount is a building site, not a career. Anyone who lived through PNG LNG knows what happens when construction ends: the camps close, the buses stop, and the permanent operating roster is a fraction of the peak. Nobody at the forum said what the operations number is.

Announcing employment before you have announced financing is not planning. It is atmospherics, a figure released to make a stalled forum feel like progress, and to give Gulf's leaders something to lose by walking away.

Ask the simpler question. Who is lending the money, and on what terms?
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