Inside Malaysia's Oil and Gas Industry - Dato' Wee Yiaw Hin

Tronoh, 1^st February – The era of “easy oil” has ended. Now, there is a need for research, analysis and exploration in much more depth. These were the sentiments expressed by Dato’ Wee Yiaw Hin, PETRONAS’s Executive Vice President (EVP) of Exploration and Production, during the one hour talk held in Seminar Room 7, Undercroft.

“I liked it, very much,” said Zaiddin Fikri bin Azmi (BIS, Final Year Final Sem). For someone who took a course unrelated to the topic, he was able to understand the talk fairly well thanks to the casual flow of presentation by Dato’ Wee, he added.

The contents of the talk are summarised below:

The demand for petroleum today is 90 million barrels of oil per day. After comparing the oil prices in 2004 to those in 2008, he highlighted the few emerging technologies involved in furthering the advance of oil exploration.
Some of these include:

•          Enhanced Oil Recovery
•          Increase of oil extraction from the reservoir up to 50%
•          Oil exploration in the Artic continent
•          Start developing Biofuel from Algae
•          CCS  – carbon capture & storage

PETRONAS is also making moves at the global stage. Recently, it took over Progress Canada for 6 billion USD to acquire the technology to explore and produce shale gas.

The EVP also highlighted the “crew change”- the working population - of the industry in the past and now. There are too many fresh engineers, and between them and the senior engineers there is an extreme generation gap. The field of engineering now is such that 50% of the current engineers will retire in the next 7 to 10 years.

Current landscape of Exploration and Production (E&P) in Malaysia:

•         65-70% income of PETRONAS comes from E&P
•         Currently, Malaysia has 430 fields; 134 out of 430 fields are producing Oil & Gas.
•         Gas resources in Malaysia is around 15,000 billion (expected to deplete after 70 years)   while oil resources is around 5000 billion (will last for 30 years).
•        Over 250 billion ringgit has been spent in the Oil & Gas sector by PETRONAS.

PETRONAS is implementing its strategies in 3 areas:

•      Domestic - Driving Enhanced Oil Recovery aggressively, start re-exploring marginal fields, with aggressive exploration
•      International - Lots of venture between government
•      Capability - Enhance basic capability, E&P tech centre, Inter and Intra Business programme.

Dato’ Wee also included an overview of the current Oil & Gas industry and the exploration landscape. There were also a few words on leadership which he shared with the future engineers seated in front of him. It was an informative and enjoyable talk, worthwhile for all those planning to venture into the industry of Oil & Gas.

By Adhwa Anuar, ICT