Malaysia's state-run Petronas is em­bark­ing on a US$5 bil­lion project to de­vel­op gas re­serves from a clus­ter of fields in the North Malay basin, off Penin­su­lar Malaysia. Petronas said the project in­volved nine fields in Blocks PM301 and PM302 and in the Bergad­ing con­tract area, about 300 kilo­me­tres off the coast. The project will al­so see the com­pa­ny, along with its pro­duc­tion shar­ing con­tract part­ners, de­vel­op a 200 kilo­me­tre pipeline to trans­port gas from the fields to Kerteh, Tereng­ganu. "Petronas and its PSC part­ners are un­der­tak­ing the project on an ac­cel­er­at­ed ba­sis, with the first de­liv­ery of 100 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of gas per day ex­pect­ed by ear­ly 2013, ramp­ing up to 250 MM­cfd by 2015," Petronas said in a state­ment.

The gas from the North Malay basin project will be used to sup­ply the com­pa­ny's cus­tomers in Penin­su­lar Malaysia where it said de­mand had risen by more than 30% in re­cent years. It added it ex­pect­ed the project to would en­cour­age more in­vest­ment from oth­er in­dus­try play­ers and spur ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties which could lead to more off­shore dis­cov­er­ies. Petronas said the North Malay basin project was part of its strat­e­gy to ex­tract and evac­u­ate gas with high car­bon diox­ide con­tent as well as re­serves from mar­gin­al fields to meet the coun­try's grow­ing gas de­mand.

(up­strea­mon­line.com)