Santos first-quarter revenue drops due to Barossa Outage and Cyclone Narelle

Santos, Australia's largest gas company, reported a dip in its first-quarter sales revenue on Thursday. The drop was caused by a temporary -outage at the Barossa off-shore project and cyclone related disruptions of port operations along the west coast.

Last month, the second largest oil and gas company in the country temporarily closed its Darwin LNG facility for maintenance on the floating production vessels at the offshore Barossa Gas and Condensate Project that supplies the facility.

Santos has said that the Barossa floating storage and offloading (FPSO), which is located in South Australia, will begin to ramp up its production next week. The liquefied natural gas (LNG), however, should start within a few weeks of it coming online.

The 'Tropical Cyclone Narelle' disrupted the port operations along the west coast of the country, including at the Port of Varanus Island. This further affected the company’s revenue.

Santos' sales revenue for the three-month period ended March 31 was $1.27 billion, 1.8% lower than the previous year and below the Visible Alpha consensus of $1.28billion.

Kevin Gallagher, MD and CEO of Santos, said: "During the third quarter, Santos collaborated with Viva Energy in order to deliver part of a Cooper Basin parcel to Ampol and sold a parcel Varanus Island crude, which supported domestic refining capacities."

Gallagher was referring to the efforts of local energy companies?to secure fuel for the country as the Middle East conflict has shook up global energy markets.

Santos, based in Adelaide, said it expected first oil sales to come from its Pikka Project?in Alaska in the next few weeks. The first revenue would follow a couple of months later. Production is now forecast to plateau in the early third quarter 2026.

The quarterly production increased by 2.7%, to 22.5 million barrels equivalent (mmboe), and the sales volume rose 3.9% to 24.2 mmboe.

The average realized price of?crude oil was $75.88 per barrel, up from $66.66 the previous quarter. However, it is still lower than the $82.24 recorded a year ago.

Santos has not changed its guidance for fiscal 2026.

The shares of the 'company' rose up to 4% at A$7.735, beating the benchmark index which fell around 0.4% as of 0046 GMT.

(source: Reuters)