Dili – Australia's Woodside Petroleum has changed its position and will consider processing gas from East Timor's vast Greater Sunrise liquefied natural gas fields on East Timor shores, East Timor said on Friday.

Woodside and the East Timorese government have disagreed bitterly for years about the location of the LNG plant, and the Australian firm on Friday denied it had changed its position.

East Timor's State Secretary for Natural Resources Alfredo Pires said on Friday that during recent negotiations, Woodside had retreated from its previous position and had presented all three locations as possibilities. "The three options are, building the pipelines to Darwin or Timor-Leste, and the third is the floating plant," he said.

The East Timor government has said it wants the plant to be built in East Timor, where it can provide employment for the local population, and has resisted the possibility of building a plant on Australian shores.

Woodside has previously said a floating LNG plant will provide better economic returns for the Sunrise project, and the firm said on Friday their position on the location remains unchanged. "Floating LNG remains the preferred development concept for Sunrise," the company said in an e-mailed statement on Friday.

The Greater Sunrise fields, estimated to hold 5.13 trillion cubic feet of gas and 226 million barrels of condensate, straddle Australian and East Timorese waters but Australia has not declared a preference on the site of the processing plant.

Woodside's partners in the Sunrise project are ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and Osaka Gas.

[Reporting by Tito Belo in Dili and Rebekah Kebede in Perth; Writing by Sunanda Creagh; Editing by Clarence Fernandez.]