Page 6 - AsianOil Week 02
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SOUTH ASIA AsianOil
cargoes – around 5.8mn tonnes of LNG — from the US in financial year 2020-2021. The news outlet quoted company officials as saying that this was up from a planned 75 cargoes – around 5mn tonnes – of US LNG in 2019-2020. GAIL imported 62 cargoes of US LNG in 2018-2019, Platts said. It quoted the head of GAIL’s LNG business, Rajeev Singhal, as saying that India’s demand for LNG could rise by around 3-4% in 2020-2021.
India is expected to emerge as a major demand centre for natural gas in the coming
years as it invests heavily in building out its piped gas network. The country is investing $60bn in gas infrastructure, both pipelines and LNG import terminals, as it aims to complete a cross-country transportation grid in 2024. The country’s spending spree is aimed at raising the share of gas in the country’s energy mix to 15% by 2030.
Wood Mackenzie has predicted that national demand for gas will double to 75bn cubic metres by 2030, with LNG imports meeting half of this demand.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
Petronas to re-enter Cambodia’s energy sector
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
MALAYSIA’S state-owned Petronas is preparing to re-enter Cambodia’s oil and gas sector after exiting the South-East Asian country in 2010, a senior Malaysian diplomat has said.
Malaysia’s Ambassador to Cambodia Eldeen Husaini Mohamed Hashim met with Cambo- dian Energy Minister Suy Sem on January 9 and said that both Petronas and other Malaysian developers were eager to invest.
The Khmer Times quoted Eldeen Husaini as saying that Sem fully supported Petronas’ interest in returning. However, the Cambodian official also made it clear that Phnom Penh was more interested in upstream investment at this time.
The director-general of the Energy Ministry’s general affairs department, Chhe Lidin, had told Eldeen Husaini that while Malaysian investment was welcome in all sectors, companies should focus on the upstream.
In April 2010, Petronas exited Cambodia after operating a chain of retail fuel stations in the South- East Asian country for 16 years. Petronas opened 19 stations in 1994, but years of dwindling profits forced the Malaysian major to downsize repeatedly until it was left with only a single outlet.
Cambodia is eager to woo international inves- tors to its upstream, with the government passing a long-awaited petroleum bill in June 2019 that pro- motes this segment. Sem said at the time that the law was aimed at “managing and developing petro- leum resources sustainably and effectively” for the country’s long-term socio-economic development. Under the bill, developers can apply for exploration and development licences that span up to 30 years. The minister added that the new regulation should help boost investor confidence in the country’s oil and gas sector.
Cambodia consumes around 2.5m tonnes per year (50,000 barrels per day, bpd) of petro- leum, all of which is imported from Singa- pore, Thailand and Vietnam, according to the energy ministry.
The government hopes that foreign energy companies will be more inclined to follow Sin- gapore-based KrisEnergy’s lead. The company has been developing the Apsara oilfield since late 2017, which lies in the offshore Khmer Basin’s Block A. KrisEnergy said on December 6 that it had begun cutting first steel for the oilfield’s min- imum facilities wellhead platform.
On December 11, the ministry’s General Department of Petroleum director-general Cheap Sour told The Phnom Penh Post that the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Mubadala Petro- leum had expressed interest in investing in both the upstream and downstream.
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w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 02 15•January•2020
