Fund management board needed for Natuna gas development: BPMIGAS
Thursday, February 19 2009 - 02:16 AM WIB
The agency?s chairman, R. Priyono, said in Jakarta on Wednesday that the proposed fund management board for the development of the Natuna gas block should be managed by credible international financial agencies.
The board is comparable to the one formed for the Tangguh LNG project, which is headed by Asian Development Bank (ADB), acccording to Priyono.
"Pertamina (should) ask for 'trustee letter' from the government as (the owner of) the Tangguh project did," Priyono said.
According to him, the development of the Natuna field will require at least US$40 billion.
"How could you raise such amount of funds in the current situation when raising only $400 million is not easy?" Priyono said.
?Pertamina will need to raise a large amount of funds from the international money market. There will be no investors interested in providing the fund, if the funds are not professionally managed by a reliable agency,? he said.
Meanwhile, Pertamina's President Karen Agustiawan said the firm had yet to ask for a trustee letter from the government.
The government has handed over the block to Pertamina after the contract owned by American oil and gas giant ExxonMobil Corp. expired. The block is believed to hold 47 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.
Karen said in November last year that Pertamina was ready to farm out up to 60 percent interest in the giant block to partner and did not rule out the possibility of selecting more than one partners. Pertamina and the partner(s) might form a Joint Operating Committee to co-operate the block.
Pertamina has short-listed eight international companies as potential partners to develop the block. The companies are ExxonMobil, Corp., Total SA, Chevron Corp., StatOil, Royal Dutch/Shell, Eni SpA, Petronas and China National Petroleum Corp. (Godang)