He said the company had begun the $66 million front-end engineering and design.
In July, AGL entered into a $4.5-billion conditional agreement to buy 1,500 petajoules of gas from the PNG gas project over 20 years from 2009. The company also entered into a conditional agreement with Oil Search Ltd to take a 10% stake in the project for $300 million. Mr Johnson said AGL was also looking at increasing its investment in power generation. “AGL continues to evaluate additional renewable and gas-fired power generation opportunities including both existing and new plant across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland,” he said. He noted that some shareholders and analysts believed AGL to be under-geared, and said the company was continuing to examine its balance sheet.