Petronas to continue aggressive exploration

Moving ahead: In the last five years, 970 exploration wells were drilled in South-East Asia with about one fifth or 171 wells in Malaysian waters.

KUALA LUMPUR: Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) will continue to undertake aggressive exploration and appraisal activities despite the global low oil price environment.

General Manager, Malaysia Petroleum Management, Mohd Redhani Abdul Rahman said Petronas feels that this is one of the main strategic thrusts that has been working for Malaysia for the past five to 10 years.

“In the last five years, 970 exploration wells were drilled in South-East Asia and about one fifth of them, or 171 wells, were drilled in Malaysian waters.

“The 970 wells drilled have brought in an additional 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with Malaysia contributing half of the new addition," he said at the Asia Petroleum and Geoscience Conference and Exhibition (APGCE) 2015 here yesterday.

Mohd Redhani was a panellist at a special session entitled "South East Asia Exploration Challenges: Geoscience Innovations and Business Solutions", which discussed recent and potential future success factors in finding significant new hydrocarbon resources in the South-East Asia region.

He said Petronas acknowledged that the oil and gas industry in Malaysia was maturing and that what was left to explore were the riskier areas.

“We will continue to listen to the market and we will continue to revise our fiscal term to be commensurate with the risk that investors are putting in,” he said.

He said the company would also adopt a more sensible approach such as easier market access for small cap companies.

“It means that we are going to make our data a lot more open and we are going to have multiclients such as the first multiclients seismic deepwater survey offshore Sabah.

“We will embark on open data repository starting in 2016,” he said. – Bernama