Petronas Makes Major Discovery Offshore Sabah

Dear Reader,

After a long time of not putting up posts, I thought that it'd be nice to put up some content on this blog again. Here is a piece of news that caught my eye recently, from The Star Online.

Petronas Carigali Makes Major Oil Discovery Offshore Sabah 

PETALING JAYA: Petronas Carigali Sdn Bhd, the exploration and production arm of Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas), has discovered oil 100km off the northwest coast of Kota Kinabalu.

.....

“Current preliminary estimation of the hydrocarbon-in-place from this discovery is 227 million barrels of oil equivalent, with expected upside potential,” it said.

The company added that there were plans to further appraise the discovery in the near future.

The 2011/2012 Economic Report released in early October estimates the country’s crude oil production to fall 6% to 600,000 barrels per day before picking up next year.

This is following the completion of the Reservoir Management Plan as well as the resumption of production in several oil fields in Sabah.

According to the report, as at Jan 1, there were an estimated 5.86 billion barrels of crude oil reserves with an expected lifespan of 25 years.

Meanwhile, gas reserves stood at 88.9 trillion standard cu ft, sufficient to last 39 years, it said.

(Source: The Star Online, 16th November 2011. "Petronas Carigali makes major oil discovery offshore Sabah" URL: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/11/16/business/9909344)



 So, dear Reader, after reading the above article, I concluded that it means that:

1. Malaysia's estimated oil reserves have just received a boost;
2. According to our nation's petroleum planning department's estimates, we should have about 25 more years of crude oil reserves (and this number should be revised upwards with this discovery);
3. At first blush, the discovery may yield about 227 million barrels of oil, but this is only an initial estimate and may be revised upwards;
4. Through this article I learned about Petronas's Reservoir Management Plan^*, but it seems that it's old news, and you can see it in various articles on Petronas from 2009, 2010 and 2011; and
5. I may be back to blogging and I hope that you will leave some comments for me!

On a side note, you may notice that the site looks slightly different now. This is not going to be one of those guessing games where you try to guess whether I got a haircut yesterday, but I made some changes to the CSS and in terms of website, it's a little like a haircut. It's just a little change that should make links look a little different.... if you are using Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. For those of you stuck with Internet Explorer, I know it looks rather plain, I'm sorry about that. I'll try to learn a little bit more CSS.

Thank you for reading!
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Notes
^* It was also mentioned in Petronas's 2010 Sustainability Report at page 18, get it here.