Eni has made a significant natural gas discovery offshore Indonesia, a month after creating a joint venture with Malaysia’s Petronas to combine their offshore assets in Southeast Asia.
Eni announced on Tuesday a significant gas discovery in the Konta-1 exploration well in the Kutei Basin, about 50 km (31 miles) off the coast of East Kalimantan in Indonesia.
Estimates indicate 600 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of gas initially in place with a potential upside beyond 1 trillion cubic feet, the Italian energy major said.
The Konta discovery is close to producing facilities and adjacent to existing discoveries, providing significant synergies for the development, and options for a fast-track development are already being studied, Eni said.
The major discovery gives Eni confidence that its planned exploration drilling campaign, with the drilling of four other wells in the Kutei Basin in 2026, would encounter additional gas resources.
The Konta gas discovery was made shortly after Eni and Petronas announced plans for $15 billion in investment in developing the proved reserves in Indonesia and Malaysia over the next five years.
As part of the plans, Eni and Petronas are looking to start up as many as eight new upstream projects in Indonesia and Malaysia over the next three years, Eni’s chief executive Claudio Descalzi said last month.
“The 15 billion is the first stage, it is based just on the P1 reserves,” Descalzi Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama in an interview.
The joint venture will integrate a portfolio of gas-producing and development assets across Malaysia and Indonesia, with an initial production base of over 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) and plans to grow to more than 500,000 boe/d of sustainable production in the medium term.
The new business in Southeast Asia is part of Eni’s so-called “satellite model strategy”, following similar ventures such as Var Energy in Norway, Azule in Angola, and Ithaca in the UK.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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