THE Myanmar government will sell natural gas from the country’s
biggest field to the highest bidder among China, India, Bangladesh
and Thailand, an official said, dismissing reports that China
has won the contract.
The gas reserves could supply China for about a decade and there
were plans to start exporting gas from the A-1 and A-3 areas in
the Bay of Bengal in 2010, U Soe Myint, director general of the
Energy Planning Department at the Ministry of Energy, said in
Singapore during a meeting of ASEAN energy ministers.
“We have not concluded any deal with China,” U Soe
Myint said. “The price of gas is very much undervalued.”
Thailand is buying Myanmar’s gas at about US$40 a barrel
for the equivalent amount of oil by energy content, compared with
about $69 in global markets, he said.
China, India, Thailand, South Korea and Japan are competing
for a share as Myanmar discovers more gas reserves. Myanmar prefers
to send the gas via a pipeline in the first phase before considering
an LNG plant, U Soe Myint said.
South Korea’s Daewoo International, Korea Gas Corp. and
India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp. and GAIL India Ltd are
partners in the A-1 and A-3 fields.
Daewoo on August 22 said gas reserves at the fields had been certified
by independent consultants Gaffney, Cline & Associates Ltd
as between 5.4-9.1 trillion cubic feet (tcf).
The company said between 4.5 tcf and 7.7 tcf may be commercialised,
adding that the find, equivalent to two billion barrels of crude
oil, is the largest ever in Myanmar.
Myanmar officials earlier said a decision on the gas sale would
be made once the independent evaluation had been completed.
On August 14, however, India’s junior oil minister, Dinsha
Patel, said in a letter to India’s parliament that GAIL
had lost out to PetroChina in a bid to buy gas from the two blocks
off the Rakhine coast. The Myanmar government had informed the
partners of the decision on March 16, he wrote.
“They have been misled,” U Soe Myint said on August
23, blaming the media for creating the notion that Myanmar is
not interested in selling gas to India.
“We have awarded three deepwater blocks in the Rakhine offshore
area to Oil and Natural Gas.” At the same time, the government
has offered about 18 offshore areas to explorers in China, India,
Vietnam and Thailand.
A Daewoo spokesman told AFP the company hopes to supply 600
million cubic feet of gas per day, or 3.7 million tonnes of liquefied
natural gas per year, for up to 25 years.
The Seoul government would like the gas to be liquefied and
delivered to South Korea, which imports most of its oil and gas.
However, Daewoo has acknowledged it would be cheaper and quicker
to pipe the gas to neighbouring countries.
“We are in talks with potential buyers in China, Thailand
and India,” the spokesman said.
Observers largely expect global LNG demand to soar in the coming
years as Western oil majors cannot boost crude oil output in the
immediate term due to a lack of facility investment over the past
few decades.
U Soe Myint said on August 27 the Myanmar government was aiming
to increase supplies of oil and gas to its neighbours.
“Our dream is Myanmar would eventually become a major
energy supplier in this region,” he said at a seminar in
Singapore organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
“We hope to become a sort of bridge between Southeast
Asia and South Asia,” he said. – Bloomberg, AFP
