History

Our Story

Woodside has existed almost as long as there has been an oil industry in Australia. Our business was established in July 1954, a year after the country's first oil discovery.

The company took its name from the small town of Woodside in Victoria where, in 1956, we secured the state's first offshore exploration licence for a 2,600sqkm stretch off Ninety Mile Beach that extended 2km into Bass Strait. We drilled in water up to 60 metres deep, unremarkable today, but a world record in the 1950s.

We were awarded exploration rights over more than 367,000sqkm off north-western Australia (what is known as the North West Shelf) in June 1963. Exploration drilling began in 1967, with major gas and condensate discoveries made in 1971. These fields contained reserves of nearly 50 trillion cubic feet of gas and provided the basis of the $A27 billion North West Shelf Venture, Australia's largest resource project.

A contract with the State Energy Commission of Western Australia for the supply of domestic gas to industries and homes was signed in September 1980, and deliveries began in August 1984.

Five years later, the first shipment of liquefied natural gas from the North West Shelf Venture made its way to Japan. The Venture is now one of the world’s largest producers of LNG with more than 2700 cargoes delivered to the Asia Pacific region and beyond.

Today, Woodside is Australia's largest publicly traded oil and gas exploration and production company. And as one of the world’s largest LNG producers, we're ideally placed to meet the growing global demand for clean energy.