PNG paves...

At its peak, more than 21,000 people were employed during construction with the operators having to overcome flooding and extremely steep slopes as they built infrastructure including airfields and roads from scratch.

“All told, the onshore pipeline contains enough steel to build 20 Eiffel Towers,” said Neil Chapman, senior vice-president of Exxonmobil.

The project supplies four major companies in Taiwan, Japan and China and is expected to produce an estimated nine trillion cubic feet (255 billion cubic metres) of LNG over its 30-year life.