Pertamina ready to renegotiate with buyers on LNG contract periods
Thursday, May 17 2001 - 06:30 AM WIB
State oil and gas company Pertamina said on Thursday it was ready to renegotiate with its liquefied natural gas (LNG) buyers on their contracts to meet the market demand for shorter period of contracts.
"We are willing to renegotiate the contracts as long as there are win-win solutions," Baihaki said, adding the win-win solutions included buyers' readiness to buy larger amount of LNG from Pertamina.
Pertamina has signed LNG sales and purchase contracts with several companies in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, which mostly last for 20 years.
The state company could push its LNG customers to accept long-term contracts in the past decades when Pertamina had no rivals in the regional LNG market. But, today, with the entry of new LNG producers from Qatar, Australia, Malaysia and Brunei, competition in the regional LNG market had turned tougher and buyers had stronger bargaining power to ask for short-term contracts.
Thus far, Indonesia is still dominating the regional LNG market with an export of more than 22 million tons per year. (Alex/Godang)