Day: May 5, 2011

Singapore-Japan companies in joint venture to explore oil & gas in Myanmar

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Two Singapore companies, Silver Wave Energy Pte Ltd and BFI Holding Pte Ltd, have established a joint venture with Star Field Corporation and Star Holding Corporation of Japan to explore oil and gas in Myanmar. License acquired from State-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise
Drilling to commence this year at initial investment of US$100 million

9 May 2011, Singapore – Two Singapore companies, Silver Wave Energy Pte Ltd and BFI Holding Pte Ltd, have established a joint venture with Star Field Corporation and Star Holding Corporation of Japan to explore oil and gas in Myanmar.

The joint venture company, Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd, has acquired the exclusive exploration licence rights with a Production Sharing Contract (PSC) from the state-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) for all oil-prospecting acquisitions at Block B (B 2) in Northern Myanmar.

The 19066 km2 block is located in the Hukaung Valley in Kachin State, northwest of Myanmar on the border with India and and crosses three geological provinces – Chindwin Basin, Wuntho Massif and Shwebo Basin. 

Myanmar is one of the world’s oldest oil producers, exporting its first barrel in 1853. In 1963, the country held state-rights to prospecting and kept foreign companies out, but as of 1998, reopened legislation to allow foreign companies and technology to prospect for oil. In 2007, Silver Wave Energy was one of the nine foreign oil companies involved in sixteen onshore blocks to explore, reactivate, enhance recover and produce oil. Having invested in research and the foundations for oil production in Block B (B 2), the Production Sharing Contract (PSC) has now been acquired by Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd to start exploration.

Myanmar has estimated 2.512 trillion cubic metres (TCM) of natural gas and 3.2 billion barrels of crude oil, of which 0.59 TCM of natural gas and 212.1 million barrels of crude oil have been reported recoverable as of 2007. Although ranked fortieth by international standards, from a regional perspective, its reserves are significant. Its geographic proximity to China, India and South Korea also offers a large captive and very receptive market for Myanmar.

Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd will commence drilling operations in Block B (B 2) this year at a budget of US$100 million as the initial investment.

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Lee Kon Lin of Silver Wave Energy PTE LTD has informed Mizzima that contrary to last week’s press release Silver Wave Exploration will not drill in Hukaung (Hugawng) Valley in Kachin state but farther south in Block B2 in Sagaing Division.      

http://www.mizzima.com/edop/analysis/5253-silver-wave-says-it-will-not-drill-in-hukaung-valley.html

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Singapore-Japan companies in joint venture to explore oil & gas in Myanmar18/04/2011
2 Singapore companies – Silver Wave Energy Pte Ltd and BFI Holding Pte Ltd have come together with 2 Japanese companies – Star Field Corporation and Star Holding Corporation to form a joint venture company – Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd.Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd has acquired all licence rights for exploration and production oil-prospecting acquisitions at Block B (B 2) in northern Myanmar from the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, or MOGE, signed with Silver Wave Energy Pte Ltd.

The block is located in the Hukaung Valley in Kachin State, northwest of Myanmar on the border with India. It consists of about 19000 km2 and crossesthree geological provinces – Chindwin Basin, Wuntho Massif and Shwebo Basin.

Myanmar has 19 onshore and 3 major offshore oil and gas fields and the initial seismic surveys of the block indicate that there could be 90 TCF of gas reserves and 3.2 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves.

Silver Wave Exploration & Production Pte Ltd will commence drilling operations in Block B (B 2) within this year at an estimated cost of US$ 100 million.

The oil and gas exploration project in Myanmar will be the first of many such projects by Silver Wave Exploration and Production Pte Ltd. It is currently expanding and looking into other similar opportunities in Sudan, Guinea-Conakry, Indonesia and Iraq.

Foreign minister denies Myanmar purchasing arms from RI

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The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 05/04/2011 7:35 PM | National

A | A | A |

Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa said Wednesday that he was not aware of a plan for arms procurement by Myanmar from Indonesia’s state-owned arms producer PT Pindad.

“I’m not aware of a plan by any particular entity to sell arms to Myanmar or any other country,” he told The Jakarta Post.

He also said that arms purchases and sales were a sensitive issue to discuss.

“There are standards and norms that must be respected and I’m sure it applies equally to our relationship with Myanmar,” Marty said. (swd)

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/05/04/foreign-minister-denies-myanmar-purchasing-arms-ri.html?

Border disputes, Myanmar may eclipse ASEAN’s progress

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The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Thu, 05/05/2011 8:00 AM | Headlines

The lack of consensus in handling inter-regional issues such as border disputes, Myanmar’s government and competing claims in the South China Sea are clouding ASEAN’s efforts to become a full-fl edged community by 2015, according to experts.

ASEAN’s dreams of becoming a security community will remain unrealized unless the association backs away from its pledge not to use force to solve problems, according to Rizal Sukma, executive director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“The Thai-Cambodia border dispute shows that members of ASEAN can’t refrain from using force with each other. How can you say we are a community if we attack each other?” he said.

Despite the active involvement of Indonesia and ASEAN in brokering talks between Thailand and Cambodia, the two nations continue to exchange fi re along their border. The latest fl are-up is a fi ght over a stretch of border close to Tan Moan and Tan Krabey, two 12th century Hindu temples that both sides claim.

So far, 18 people on both sides have been killed in 12 days of gunfi ghts, grenade attacks and artillery bombardments that have displaced 65,000 people. Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa previously said that the border dispute was not a good criteria for judging ASEAN’s success.

“The criteria should be ASEAN’s response, [which was] to choose to immediately facilitate and engage. [It was] unprecedented, as it has never happened before. But it is a huge scar that requires the engagement and good will by the two sides.”

“We have a choice of denial and to sweep things under the carpet. But we chose instead to directly engage. Indonesia, as the chair of ASEAN, immediately got in touch with the two parties concerned — not to mediate between them, but to facilitate a solution.” ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said that the border dispute was an “embarrassment” for the association, which was initially forged to prevent open war in the region.

A strong political commitment was needed from the governments of Thailand and Cambodia to solve the issue “quickly and effectively”, regardless of domestic political concerns, he said.

On Myanmar, Rizal said that ASEAN should mobilize civil society groups, the media and the private sector to help empower the people of Myanmar. “There should a clear ASEAN road map on what to do to help Myanmar’s people, including the establishment of ASEAN aid, which is collected from member countries. This fund can be used to help those members that need assistance.”

Marty agreed saying that problems in Myanmar persisted despite the recent elections that installed a new government. “It is simply a work in progress. None of us can deny the fact that there’s been important developments in Myanmar over the past few months.

Of course, the election was not without problems and challenges. However a new government has been set up, and this offers protection for part of the democratization effort in Myanmar,” he said. Marty said he hoped that the release of Ang San Suu Kyi the refl ected readiness of Myanmar to be more inclusive and reconciliatory.

On territorial disputes between China and four ASEAN members, Rizal said Indonesia, as ASEAN’s chair, must develop a consensus on the desired outcome for the association to achieve a tangible results during negotiations. “The current negotiations must be pushed to the level of senior offi cials, who can fi nish negotiations.”

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/05/05/border-disputes-myanmar-may-eclipse-asean’s-progress.html

SBY to meet Myanmar President, discuss investment

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Erwida Maulia, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Thu, 05/05/2011 12:01 PM | World

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is scheduled on Thursday to receive Myanmarese President U Thein Sein and discuss opportunities for Indonesian businesses to invest in Myanmar.

The two heads of state are scheduled to attend a bilateral meeting at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, with topics of discussion to include the enhancement of cooperation in a number of sectors, including politics, security, economy and culture.

“The bilateral meeting will also be used to explore opportunities for

Indonesia to invest in Myanmar, particularly in the energy and agriculture sectors.

“These two sectors of partnership are in line with Indonesia’s

priorities concerning energy and food security,” Indonesian

presidential spokesman Teuku Faizasyah says in a press statement sent

to The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Faizasyah adds that the two leaders are also expected to discuss regional issues in regards to Indonesia’s current chairing of the ASEAN as, with Sein also in Jakarta to attend the ASEAN Summit, which commences this weekend.

“This state visit reflects the close relations between Indonesia and Myanmar. It is the first state visit by the Myanmar President, His Excellency U Thein Sein, since he was elected President and after the Myanmarese government’s successful implementation of seven stages in its Roadmap to Democracy,” Faizasyah says.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/05/05/sby-meet-myanmar-president-discuss-investment.html

အခ်ိန္မဟုတ္ မုိးရြာသြန္းမႈေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္ယာစုိက္သူမ်ား အခက္ႀကဳံရ

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အခ်ိန္မဟုတ္ မုိးရြာသြန္းမႈေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္ယာစုိက္သူမ်ား အခက္ႀကဳံရ

ေမလ ၄ရက္။ နန္းထူးစံ (ေကအုိင္စီ)

ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ ေျမာက္ပုိင္း ေတာင္ငူခရုိင္အတြင္းရွိ ေတာင္ေပၚေဒသမ်ားတြင္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ဧၿပီလဆန္းပုိင္းမွစ၍ ယခုခ်ိန္အထိ အခ်ိန္အခါမဟုတ္ မုိးရြာသြန္းမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္ယာစပါးစုိက္ပ်ဳိးမည့္ လူထုမ်ားသည္ ၎တုိ႔ခုတ္ထားေသာ ေတာင္ယာခင္း မ်ားကုိ မီး႐ိႈ႕ရွင္းလင္းရန္ အခက္ႀကဳံေနေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။

ေတာင္ငူေဒသခံတဦးက “ဒီႏွစ္မွာ ဧၿပီလကစၿပီးေတာ့ မုိးက မၾကာခဏရြာတယ္။ ခုခ်ိန္အထိပဲ။ တခါခါရြာရင္ သုံးေလးငါးရက္ ဆုိေတာ့ ခုတ္ထားတဲ့ ေတာင္ယာခင္းေတြက ဘယ္လုိမွ မီး႐ိႈ႕လုိ႔မရဘူး။ ဒီႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ ေတာင္ယာလုပ္သူေတြအတြက္ေတာ့ အလားအလာ မေကာင္းဘူး။”ဟု ေကအုိင္စီကုိ ေျပာသည္။

“တခ်ဳိ႕ေတာင္ယာေတြ မီးရွဳိ႕ထားတာရွိတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ မုိးရြာေတာ့ ခုတ္လွဲထားတဲ့အပင္ေတြ မေျခာက္ေတာ့ မီးမစားႏုိင္ဘူး။ အပင္ႀကီးေတြဆုိ မဖယ္ႏုိင္ဘူး။ အဲဒီအတုိင္းပဲ ထားရတယ္။ ေတာင္ယာဆုိတဲ့ဟာမ်ဳိးက မီးေလာင္မွ လုပ္လုိ႔ေကာင္းတာ။ မီး ေလာင္မွ ေျမၾသဇာရမယ္။ ေျမၾသဇာရွိမွ အပင္ေကာင္းမယ္ေလ။” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။

ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသားအစည္းအ႐ုံး(KNU) သတ္မွတ္နယ္ေျမ၊ ေတာင္ငူခ႐ုိင္၊ သံေတာင္ႏွင့္ ထန္းတပင္ၿမဳိ႕နယ္ရွိ ေတာင္ေပၚေဒသ မ်ားတြင္ ေနထုိင္ၾကသူမ်ားသည္ ယမန္ႏွစ္က ၎တုိ႔၏ အသက္ေမြးဝမ္းေၾကာင္းရာ ဖာလာၿခံ၊ ကြမ္းၿခံ၊ ဒူးရင္းၿခံ အေတာ္မ်ား မ်ားကုိ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္က မီး႐ိႈ႕ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ယခုႏွစ္တြင္ ထုိၿခံမ်ားကုိ အားကုိး၍မရေတာ့သည့္အတြက္ ေတာင္ယာ စပါးစုိက္ပ်ဳိးေရးကုိ ပုိမုိလုပ္ေဆာင္လာသည္။

သုိ႔ေသာ္ ယခုလုိ ရာသီဥတုေဖာက္ျပန္မႈကုိ ၾကည့္ျခင္းအားျဖင့္ ေတာင္ယာလုပ္ငန္းသည္လည္း အလားအလာ မေကာင္းေသာ ေၾကာင့္ လာမည့္ႏွစ္တြင္ ထုိေတာင္ငူေဒသခံမ်ားအတြက္ ဆန္စပါး အခက္အခဲမ်ား ရွိလာႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံလူထုမ်ားက သုံး သပ္ေျပာဆိုေနၾကသည္။

http://www.kicnews.org/?p=5440

Thailand won’t sign Indonesian observer document if Cambodian troops don’t withdraw: PM

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BANGKOK, May 5 – Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Thursday asserted he will not endorse the documents endorsing the presence of Indonesian observers at the disputed border of Thailand and Cambodia until its neighbour withdraws its troops and citizens from the contested area.

The Thai premier reaffirmed his stance again as Indonesia, as current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), proposed to send observers to the Thai-Cambodian borders following sporadic clashes of troops of the two neighbours, with both accusing the other of causing the clashes.

Mr Abhisit said there are written documents on the manning of Indonesian observers and the Thai foreign ministry has discussed with Indonesia that the observers will be allowed only if Cambodia first withdraws its troops and residents from the 4.6 square kilometre tract contested by the two countries.

The presence of the Cambodians in the disputed area breaches the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by both countries in 2000 and it is the duty of Indonesia to seek cooperation from Phnom Penh on the matter, Mr Abhisit said.

“I won’t endorse any document allowing the Indonesian observers if Thailand’s request is not responded to,” Mr Abhisit reasserted.

The content of the agreement is not the problem, Mr Abhisit emphasised. “Progress depends on the talks between Thailand and Indonesia, and also between Indonesia and Cambodia. Our ultimate goal is to avoid any clash at the border,” said the Thai premier.

As Cambodia is now seeking an International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s interpretation of its 1962 ruling on Preah Vihear and accuses Thailand of attempting to claim Cambodian territory, Mr Abhisit said Thailand expects to give facts to the world over the series of clashes which he says indicate Phnom Penh’s intention to internationalise the conflict.

The court, based in The Hague, ruled in 1962 that the ancient temple belonged to Cambodia, but did not rule on the surrounding area and both Phnom Penh and Bangkok claim ownership of the 4.6-square-kilometre tract.

When asked whether Thailand is at disadvantage in contending the case, Mr Abhisit reaffirmed there are several aspects that Thailand can contest in the court, but refused to give further detail, citing concerns over the affect on the case. (MCOT online news)