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Woodside Energy produces and sells liquefied natural gas, pipeline gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids to customers around the world.
Woodside Energy is one of Australia's biggest energy companies. It pulls natural gas and oil out of the ground, mostly off the coast of Western Australia, and sells them to buyers at home and abroad. Its flagship products are liquefied natural gas (LNG), pipeline gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids. The LNG part matters most: gas chilled to about minus 160°C turns into a liquid, which shrinks its volume roughly 600 times and lets it travel on special ships to countries that need energy but have no pipelines connecting them.
Who pays Woodside? Mostly large utility companies, power producers, and industrial buyers in Asia — Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan have long been big customers — plus domestic gas users in Australia. They buy under long-term contracts that can run for a decade or more, which gives Woodside a steadier stream of cash than simply selling oil at whatever the market pays that day. The company's edge comes from scale and location: its huge North West Shelf and Pluto LNG plants sit relatively close to Asian ports, cutting shipping time and cost compared with rivals in the Middle East or the US. Woodside used to be called Woodside Petroleum and was long controlled by Shell, which sold down its stake over the years. In 2022 the company merged with BHP's oil and gas business, a deal that roughly doubled its size and gave it oil assets in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. It has also pushed into new areas: a big Scarborough gas project off Western Australia, and early bets on ammonia and hydrogen as cleaner fuels for the future.
The business is heavily exposed to energy prices, and that shows. Revenue jumped when gas prices spiked after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then fell back as prices cooled. Woodside spends heavily on building new plants, which eats into cash flow, but it still pays a sizable dividend to shareholders. The big risks are falling gas prices, project delays and cost overruns, and the slow global shift away from fossil fuels. Its customers increasingly weigh cleaner energy, and Woodside's answer so far is to sell more gas as a "transition" fuel while quietly planting seeds in lower-carbon products.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026