14/07/2026
The Banks Have Already Voted on Papua LNG — And It Wasn't Yes
Patrick Pouyanné (Total Energies CEO) wants us to believe Papua LNG is a done deal awaiting paperwork. "We are around $14 to $15 billion, not at $18 billion, not at $12 billion," the TotalEnergies chief declared in February, promising a final investment decision this year. Prime Minister Marape has echoed the confidence, assuring Papua New Guineans the project "is not abandoned."
But follow the money, and a different story emerges. Twenty-nine banks and export credit agencies have now ruled out financing Papua LNG. That is not a rounding error. That is a verdict.
Consider who has walked away. Crédit Agricole was not some peripheral lender, it was the project's own lead financial advisor, the institution TotalEnergies chose to assemble the debt package. It quit in 2024 rather than defend the project to its own risk committees. Every major French bank followed. So did all four Australian majors — ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac, institutions that know Papua New Guinea's resource sector intimately, because most of them helped finance PNG LNG the first time around. The banks with the deepest institutional memory of PNG megaprojects looked at the sequel and said no.
Then came December 2025, when six NGOs, including PNG's own Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights, filed a formal complaint with the Equator Principles Association, alleging the project breaches six of the ten principles governing environmental and social risk. Within two months, twelve more institutions ruled themselves out, ING and Rabobank among them. One in six Equator Principles signatories worldwide has now publicly refused this project. When a sixth of the global project-finance establishment declares your deal untouchable, the problem is not activist noise. The problem is the deal.
That leaves Japan's MUFG holding the advisory mandate, hunting for a syndicate among a shrinking pool of willing lenders. Compare that with PNG LNG, which closed roughly US$14 billion in financing backed by a broad coalition of commercial banks and export credit agencies from Japan, the United States, Australia, Italy and China. Papua LNG must raise comparable money from a far narrower base, and narrower money is more expensive money, on a project whose costs already blew out from early estimates of US$10–12 billion to US$18 billion before being talked back down through a second bidding round. "Optimised" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.
Meanwhile, the risks Papua New Guinea carries are quietly compounding. The State's 22.5 per cent back-in must be financed by Kumul Petroleum, whose chairman has already conceded there is "no windfall cash" even with PNG LNG's project debt finally retired in December 2025, income remains hostage to world petroleum prices. And FID cannot happen at all until the Development Forum delivers a landowner benefit-sharing agreement, a process whose history in this country counsels humility, not press-release deadlines.
Six years of missed FID dates. A cost estimate that has swung by billions. A lead advisor that resigned. Twenty-nine financiers gone. An unresolved landowner process. Against all that stands one thing: the operator's insistence that everything is on track.
Perhaps MUFG conjures a syndicate and TotalEnergies proves the doubters wrong. But Papua New Guineans have heard "transformational" before, and the institutions whose job it is to price risk have spoken with unusual clarity. When the people holding the chequebooks keep leaving the room, it is worth asking who is left at the table — and why.
